Meet Valkyrie. It’s a robot designed for NASA as part of a competition by the organisation’s Johnson Space Center. Don’t get too attached; he’s designed to go to very faraway places we really shouldn’t be going. At least not until we’re ready.
Standing nearly 2m tall and weighing in at 125kg, it’s humanoid in design because it’s designed to use our equipment and simulate things real humans will be doing. Only, it will be the first one doing it, on places like Mars, so that no/fewer humans have to die in the process.
I’ve referred to the robot as “it” so far, but people are already calling it “she”, both due to the name (Valkyries were female figures in Norse mythology) as well as a busty chest, which designers say “houses the linear actuators that allow the robot to rotate at the waist, while also providing some protection if the robot falls forward”.
NASA JSC Unveils ‘Valkyrie’ DRC Robot [IEEE Spectrum]
Comments
4 responses to “NASA Has A Robot That Might Die On Mars So We Don’t Have To”
Just reading that title made me think of a movie, where humans design robots to test out various ways of dying, but one of those robots achieves sentience and emotions, and escapes the robot murder compound, and attempts to make his way to the mountains to live out the rest of his days, cos he saw a postcard of them on one of the robot engineers workstations and thought it was pretty….
Sounds like a rather darkened, Kubrick-esque version of Short Circuit.
I’M IN.
My thought was more along the lines of a movie with a robot built to be a fore-runner to human exploration that realises it is expendable and starts lying to the humans in order to lead them to their deaths.
Pretty cool that it’s powered by an arc reactor just like Iron Man.