I bring this up because there are astronauts flying around in the International Space Station right now, even farther away than we can imagine as we sit on earth, hoping the cable won't go out. I was reading a thing on the CNN page about these people out there rocketing around, and how "the crews have a little companion that can take the edge off all that exospheric social distancing."
I don't think they have to stay six feet away from each other up on the ISS, and it wouldn't matter in the case of this special companion anyhow, because that companion just happens to be a little robot named CIMON.
In the time-honored manner of NASA having humorous names and acronyms for things, CIMON stands for "Crew Interactive MObile companioN" and, unlike human assistants who need sleep or days off or get a little miffed when there are no more honey-dipt donuts left at break time, CIMON is ready to go at all times. This is what they call artificial intelligence, and let's just say you wouldn't want to play Uno with him. He's very smart.
CIMON is similar to those Siri or Alexa people you may already have in your house, but the tasks he is given are a tad tougher than "Play Yanni for me" or "Add catsup to the grocery list." When an astronaut tells CIMON what to do, the little machine communicates with Watson, IBM's processor that is eerily close to many humans we know. In fact, you take your average smart guy, and Watson, and neither of them can learn to dance very well.
CIMON is there to help the flyguys and flywomen deal with everyday tasks aboard the space station. And I think movie fans will notice a great resemblance to another flying robot from the past, whose name was Otto.
Flight 2-0-9'er, you are cleared for take-off. You ever been in a cockpit before? Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?
No comments:
Post a Comment