Google’s Project Tango Helps Robots Fly on ISS

Between the one-day public sale of Google Glass smart goggles and the revelation that it is working oncontact lenses smart enough to seefor the people wearing them, there's an argument to be made that Google has done enough for nontraditional gadget design for one week.

However, the April 16 debut of the modular, endlessly customizableProject Arawas only the appetizer in Google's you-won't-believe-this-is-a-phone sweepstakes.

Project Tango -- a Project Ara spinoff that includes a vision processor, a depth sensor, a motion-tracking camera, and hardware sophisticated enough tobuild a detailed three-dimensional modelof its surroundings by collecting precise motion and positional data 250,000 times per second -- has become a space bowling ball.

The Samsung Nexus S-equipped SPHERE robotic satellite sits on its charging post before being launched to the ISS in late 2013.

(Source: NASA)

Since 2003, NASA has been using the enclosed but near-zero-gravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS) to test propulsion, control, navigation, and self-piloting systems for satellites, using the bowling-ball-shaped Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) robots, whose name appears to embarrass no one.

The robots, which can be remotely controlled or fly autonomously, are used as test beds for control of larger robots or satellites and as prototypes to help the ISS crew or other planetary explorers by doing things like inspecting the outer hull or other objects in orbit, on Mars, or in other environments unfriendly enough to make the jobs more appropriate for space bowling balls than for humans.

NASA's website offers atimeline of experimentsand results, along with theSPHERES origin story. The gist is that David W. Miller, an aeronautical engineering professor at MIT, is to blame. In a 1999 lecture, he showed students the scene inStar Warsin which a blast-helmeted Luke Skywalker is embarrassed by a floating, spherical, ray-gun-armed droid that has no trouble avoiding his light saber. "I want you to build me some of those," he said, so they did, according to NASA.

The SPHERES robots used mostly custom-designed circuits until 2011, when an Android-based Samsung Nexus S was strapped to the outside of a SPHERE and connected using an expansion port. The phone became the brains for almost everything except the robot's internal operation.

NASA's satellite tech-testing SPHERES robots jet themselves around the ISS using cO2 canisters, the brains of a Samsung Nexus smartphone, and, soon, Google's 3D-visual powerhouse Project Tango.

(Source: NASA)

"With the smartphone, the SPHERES will have a built-in camera to take pictures and video, sensors to help conduct inspections, a powerful computing unit to make calculations, and a Wi-Fi connection that we will use to transfer data in real-time to the space station and mission control," David Miller, an MIT professor and lead engineer of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., said in a 2011 press release.

On Feb. 20, NASA announced thatSPHERES would get another upgrade. The Nexus S is being replaced with the souped-up Project Ara phone Google callsProject Tangoand describes as "an attempt to create… a mobile device that shares our sense of space and movement, that understands and perceives the world the same way we do."

"This allows the satellites to do a better job of flying around on the space station and understanding where exactly they are," Terry Fong, director of the Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, said in the February NASA announcement.

Google talks about Project Tango and its 3D sensibility in aYouTube video. NASA demonstrates SPHERES' stuff and talks about Tango in its own video available here:

According to aniFixit teardown of a Project Tango phone, Tango's most surprising 3D hardware comes from a hot new Capri PS1200 SoC 3D imaging chip built by Apple's PrimeSense. This chip has not yet shown up in any Apple hardware.

It also has a top-of-the-line Qualcomm 8974 Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of Elpida LPDDR3 RAM, two Myriad 1 image co-processors, and two AMIC A25LO16 16Mbit low-voltage flash memory ICs. MEMS motion tracking comes from an InvenSense MPU-9150 nine-axis gyroscope-accelerometer-compass. An OmniVision CameraChip with a fisheye lens provides a 180-degree field of vision. A second Omnivision sensor that sees in both the visible and infrared spectrums to help judge depth, and a front-facing camera offers a 120-degree field of vision. The device ponders all that vision using 16 Mbit of SP1 flash memory from Winbond and 64 GB of SanDisk iNAND flash memory.[!--empirenews.page--]

The iFixit crew called Project Tango "exceptionally cool" and gave it a Reparability Score of 9 out of 10, though that review seem slightly less giddy than NASA's assessment.

"This is no ordinary upgrade -- we've customized cutting-edge commercial technologies to help us answer questions like: How can robots help humans live and work in space?" Fong said in the February release. "Building on our experience in controlling robots on the space station, one day we'll be able to apply what we've learned and have humans and robots working together everywhere from Earth's orbit, to the moon, asteroids and Mars."

Tango and SPHERES will go on several test flights starting next month and will go to the ISS late this year, according to NASA. Fong said he hopes Tango's comparatively better ability to sense and keep track of itself in three dimensions can help the robots fly themselves well enough to handle inspections or repairs outside the ISS hull with only minimal instructions from controllers inside or on the ground.

A robot that can fly well enough to hold itself in position while waiting for a command to cross light-seconds of distance from a controller on the ground might be able to work relatively unassisted outside the space station. A robot that needed real-time piloting just to keep from drifting too far away to return under its own power would be far less useful. The exterior surface of a space station may be only inches away from the interior space, but it's a lot closer to the ends of the universe for a bowling ball-sized robot with the brain of a cellphone and two tiny bottles of CO2 to help get it back home.