Droids on the ISS

[tw]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

But there's a problem: Flying in formation is trickier than it sounds. Ask a crowd of people to line up single file, and they'll be able to figure it out and do it rather easily. Getting a group of orbiting satellites to do the same thing, it turns out, is extremely hard.

It's all part of a larger concept in advanced science. Literally all NASA science is done in less than 10% of NASA's budget. A project ongoing on Nasa projects from Mars Rovers to new weather satellites is autonomous operation. Rovers are learning how to identify and focus on dust devils and other Martian activities. Satellites are learning what photographs are more important. Deep Space probes such as Hyguens were also performing autonomous functions due to time for radio waves to travel. Formation flying is but another of those functions that were also part of the Grand Challenge.

Testing is ongoing in Chile's Atacama Desert. Other examples are Sony AIBO pet dog, floor-cleaning Roomba, Honda's soccer playing robots, and McGill University's amphibian Aqua.

Satellites have long been dumb creatures. Almost all intelligence has been ground based computers. A low orbit satellite needed many ground stations or a relay network (TDRSS) to constantly be controlled. Putting intelligence in satellites is but a very recent trend inspired firstmost to eliminate so many ground stations. Martian Rovers are recently being reprogrammed with autonomous abilities - all part of a growing movement towared autonomous operations.