Google's public sector division is working with NASA on a robot intended to help astronauts with medical tasks, cargo handling and maintenance on long missions.
The project brings together NASA's Human Research Program, the robotics team at Johnson Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Google public sector vice-president Jim Kelly described it in a blog post on Tuesday.
It builds on the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant, or CMO-DA, an artificial intelligence decision-support system Google has been developing with NASA since last year. CMO-DA runs on RamaLama, an open source tool supported by Red Hat, and is being evaluated on Earth-bound copies of the computers aboard the International Space Station.
The rationale is distance. A round-trip radio exchange with Mars can take as long as 44 minutes, which makes real-time guidance from the ground impractical.
The robot is not intended to practise medicine. It would work under the direction of a human crew medical officer, fetching and preparing equipment. Kelly's worked example was setting up an ultrasound for a crew member with suspected kidney stones, with the human doing the interpreting.
The eventual aim is for the machine to take voice commands under an astronaut's supervision. JPL is adapting its satellite-tracking software for three-dimensional navigation indoors.
The work is at proof-of-concept stage, and Google has not said that a space-ready robot exists. Testing has used MuJoCo, the physics simulator developed at DeepMind.
In early laboratory tests, The Register reports, the system located and moved a medical bag successfully 85 per cent of the time.
NASA declined to discuss specifics, saying only that it is working on a range of artificial intelligence projects and assessing partners' technologies for future use.
Eighty-five per cent is a respectable figure for a proof of concept, and this newspaper would like to draw attention to the remainder.
The system's assigned task is to find a bag and bring it. The task has a binary outcome, and the outcome has been measured. In fifteen cases in a hundred, the bag does not arrive.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that the crew medical officer's procedure must therefore contain a step for that branch, and that the step cannot be delegated to the machine, because the machine is the branch.
Nor can it be escalated. The entire premise of the exercise is that the ground cannot be consulted in useful time. Mission control is a competent and well-resourced body of people, and it is 44 minutes away.
Our analysts have accordingly established the outer boundary of the arrangement. On a mission to Mars, a crew facing a fifteen per cent chance of not being handed the bag has exactly one authority above them to appeal to.
Earth can be asked. It will take 44 minutes, and it does not know where the bag is.