How Telerobotics Will Help Humanity Explore Space
Advances in telerobotics are in high gear here on Earth, enabling scientists to plumb the deepest oceans, extract resources from dangerous mines and even carry out high-precision surgery from thousands of miles away.
Now researchers are considering ways to adopt and adapt telerobotics for more far-reaching duties — in outer space. The ability to extend human cognition to the moon, Mars, near-Earth objects and other accessible bodies remotely could curb the challenges, cost and risks of deep-space exploration…
The idea is that future space exploration crews could teleoperate systems deployed on planetary bodies from some distance away. Tucked inside a high-tech habitat circling a planet or perched in a module at a Lagrange point, astronauts can use high-quality telepresence to conduct surface operations on other worlds, including scouting out and mining valuable resources.
(via talkingmonkeynews, ht futurist-foresight)
