A Japanese airline wants to send you to space. Well, not you exactly, but a robot avatar that you can control in real time, while seeing through its eyes and feeling what it feels through haptic feedback.
All Nippon Airlines (ANA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have just announced the , an initiative to build these advanced humanoid drones and send them to space.
鈥淭he giant leap will be in bringing human consciousness and presence to a remote location,鈥� says Kevin Kajitani, one of the directors of the Avatar programme.
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Kajitani says these robots could be used for space construction, farming, and generally helping out astronauts, as well as to allow the general public to experience space through the avatar.
They hope to begin building avatars and testing them on Earth in 2019, moving to low-Earth orbit for more tests in the early 2020s, and then sending them to the moon and Mars.
There are pluses to the plan, says Frances Zhu at Cornell University in New York. 鈥淪ay we鈥檝e got a robot on the ISS, and the human is on Earth with a virtual reality set. The robot on the ISS doesn鈥檛 need life support, it won鈥檛 have any health problems, it鈥檚 not creating any waste, and you鈥檙e limiting the risk of human life.鈥�
But it might not be the best way for robots to help astronauts in space, says Chris Atkeson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. He says it would be more efficient to have a single operator in charge of several more autonomous robots. And as for letting the general public experience space, the avatar experience might not be as attention-grabbing as ANA hopes.
鈥淵ou鈥檙e going to have to give them something to do to keep them occupied for more than 15 minutes聽,鈥� says Atkeson. 鈥淚f you want to save a lot of money, just make a video game. Fake it, and you can make something much more entertaining.鈥�
