NASA Robonaut-2 to grow legs

NASA has announced its intention to add legs to the Robonaut 2 (R2) robot currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS), sometime next year.

The move is part of a 50 year project (currently in year 17) by NASA to investigate the possibilities of using robots on space missions. Adding legs to R2 will increase its standing height to eight feet and its weight to 500 pounds.

R2 was first delivered to the ISS in 2011 as just a head, torso and arms by the Space Shuttle Discovery and is the first dexterous robot in space (Japan's talking Kirobo robot has arms and legs but they offer virtually no functionality.)

Designed at NASA's Johnson Space center in Houston Texas, R2's purpose is to perform many of the activities that are now carried out by human astronauts.

R2 is actually one of four robonauts that NASA has built, each with a different mission in mind.

Future parts for R2 include interchangeable wheels for rolling around on the surface of a planet or moon (one configuration involves having R2 roll around on four wheels instead of just two for added stability).

NASA also plans to create a line of hands that allow the robot to perform a variety of tasks, one of which would almost certainly be taking part in missions that involve conducting space walks to perform duties or to make repairs to the ISS.

In adding legs to R2, NASA plans to eventually have the robot move autonomously around the ISS—them being long will help with movingly quickly in and out of hatches. But that's part of a long learning process.

R2 will have to start out by taking baby steps as the cramped quarters of the ISS leaves little room for clumsiness—one bump could send a human astronaut careening helplessly through a compartment likely crashing into a wall, or sensitive equipment.

The ultimate goal is have R2 move as gracefully as an antelope both inside the ISS and out while performing tasks that are either mundane or dangerous.

Having the robot perform spacewalks, for example, would also save on costs as it wouldn't require life-support and other back-up systems necessary to keep humans safe when venturing out.

Growing brain is particularly flexible

The brain is continuously changing. Neuronal structures are not hard-wired, but are modified with every learning step and every experience. Certain areas of the brain of a newborn baby are particularly flexible, however.

In animal experiments, the development of the visual cortex can be strongly influenced in the first months of life, for example, by different visual stimuli.

Nerve cells in the visual cortex of fully-grown animals divide up the processing of information from the eyes: Some “see” only the left eye, others only the right. Cells of right or left specialisation each lie close to one another in small groups, called columns.

The researchers showed that during growth, these structures are not simply inflated — columns do not become larger but their number increases. Neither do new columns form from new nerve cells. The number of nerve cells remains almost unchanged, a large part of the growth of the visual cortex can be attributed to an increase in the number of non-neuronal cells.

These changes can be explained by the fact that existing cells change their preference for the right or the left eye. In addition, another of the researchers’ observations also points to such a restructuring: The arrangement of the columns changes. While the pattern initially looks stripy, these stripes dissolve in time and the pattern becomes more irregular.

“This is an enormous achievement by the brain — undertaking such a restructuring while continuing to function,” says Wolfgang Keil, scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen and first author of the study.

“There is no engineer behind this conducting the planning, the process must generate itself.” The researchers used mathematical models and computer simulations to investigate how the brain could proceed to achieve this restructuring.

On the one hand, the brain tries to keep the neighbourhood relations in the visual cortex as uniform as possible. On the other, the development of the visual cortex is determined by the visual process itself — cells which have once been stimulated more strongly by the left or right eye try to maintain this particular calling.

The researchers’ model explains the formation of columns by taking both these tendencies into account. The scientists showed that when the tissue grows and the size of the columns is kept constant, the columns in the computer model change exactly as they had observed in their experimental studies on the visual cortex of the cat: The stripes dissolve into a zigzag pattern and thus become more irregular. In this way, the researchers provide a mathematical basis which realistically describes how the visual cortex could restructure during the growth phase.