International Space Station’s robots will be able to roam around without any obstacle as Wi-Fi will be helping them out. ISS’s existing Wi-Fi will be used to help out these robots to move around freely.
Since 2006, three small robots have been shared with ISS by the astronauts and these robots are known as SPHERES. The robots are used to test if menial tasks on the station can work with automation and in this way astronauts get more freedom to perform more interesting tasks. Right at this moment, the bots have been limited to a 2-metre wide cube and it has been marked out by five ultrasound beacons. These beacons send a locating signal like GPS.
Now if Wi-Fi is used, the SPHERES will be able to travel around the entire station which would be much more useful definitely. That’s why work is going on to use ISS’s existing Wi-Fi and hard work is put in by Terry Fong and colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. An experiment was also done and in the process an astronaut floated around the U.S. section of the station. A smartphone was used for the experiment and in the process the varying signal intensity was measured from two Wi-Fi routers at different points.
This data was turned into a map which can locate a SPHERE robot up to 1.59 metres. This is enough to detect which ISS module the robot is following.
