Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer, co-founders of Icarus Robotics, interviewed astronauts about what they were working in space when they came to the idea of a startup. Their big point: the job was more cargo logistics than cutting-edge science.
“We are a PhD warehouse worker at Amazon,” said one astronaut. If the experiment takes two hours at the station, the person continues, and the first 90 minutes are spent simply moving around the cargo and preparing the tools.
That’s a miserable waste of top talent. “Trained for two years, these astronauts come from some of the craziest military backgrounds and some of the smartest trained people on Earth, unpacking them for 14 days, repacking them, and just move around,” Barajas said.
Logistics burdens are linked to freight replenishment. Every 60 days, approximately 3.5 tons of cargo arrives at the International Space Station, and everything must be unpacked and stored.
Barajas and Palmer, whom they met in their first entrepreneurial organization, knew there had to be a better way. Their Pitch: Use intelligent and dexterous robots to take over these time-consuming chores. However, they have not started with humanoid robots. Instead, Icarus takes an iterative approach, starting with a simpler fan propulsion robot with two robot arms equipped with jaw grippers.
Icarus has gathered a $6.1 million seed round led by Soma Capital and Xtal, and got there by participating from nebulae and large high-tech ventures.
The first robot’s appearance is the function of the task it does: unpacking and storing cargo. Bringing robotics expertise to the enterprise, Palmer said that when moving to both operations, using the adjusted use of two robot arms at once, you can get around 80% of the dexterity required with a simple jaw gripper, as well as a complex human-shaped hand.
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Many of the scientific experiments that astronauts perform on the ISS are actually rather simple, such as replacing cartridges.
The team recently conducted a long-range teleoperation demonstration on the ground using a two-stage jaw gripper system, thawing out the actual ISS cargo bag, unpacking it, and zipped it up again. “We were able to demonstrate that we don’t have to reach for meaningful dexterity over long distances,” Palmer said.
Next is the flight test. Icarus is scheduled to run a parabolic flight campaign in the New Year, followed by a year-long demonstration on the ISS via Voyager Space, the operator of the commercial bishop airlock. The plan is to spend the year deleting the cargo bag operational suite and then stepping into finer tasks related to station maintenance, such as filters and seal inspections.
The robot was initially telete, and Palmer said the ISS is one of the few working sites that can justify having someone “behind the wheel” of the robot. “The margins for labor arbitration are very large,” he said, allowing Icarus to have a skilled, sophisticated robot operator for a year.
Icarus’ long-term plan is to build autonomy and versatile capabilities through “embodied AI.” It reflects what is happening in general-purpose ground robotics, coordinated for the physics of microgravity. This means collecting data with microgravity with humans in a loop and turning that dataset into a basic model of On On Orbit Robotics.
From there, Icarus aims to develop partial autonomy in which humans choose “high-level primitives.” This is a set of commands simplified to intelligent commands such as “open bag” and “unlock items.”
Ultimately, the goal is the complete autonomy of deep space regions where remote control is not feasible to complement human space activities.
“We don’t want to remove astronauts,” said Barajas, who brought the space experience that landed her first NASA internship at just 17. “We want to enhance them. We want to make the short time they are at the station to weigh as much profitability and research as possible.”
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