I saw an early version of these back in mid to late 90′s on a Discovery Channel show about the future of space exploration. The tests that they were showing were based on Earth and the sphere was holding it’s position (basically hovering) using quick bursts of CO2. Since they were contending with gravity they had to use a bunch of CO2 to keep the thing airborne and it looked like their tests were only in 5 second bursts. It was really very impressive stuff. The way the show made it seem was that these were to be used as assistants to the astronauts inside of spacecraft. You might be right, ducted fans could probably work very well in that scenario.

for a second i thought they were using gyroscopes to move them around.. dont know if its possible though..

Can you say “Robotic cameras to survey heat tiles? I pitched an idea to the NASA line a few years back about using a released satellite the size of a soccer ball to survey if any launch damage had occurred to the heat tiles….I doubt I’m the reason for the research, but that’d be a good use, don’t you think? Get it to autonomously pull in CO2 from an outboard port and it would be very useful in futher exploration.

Any else reminded of the lightsaber trainer from
Star Wars?

@dbear:
That’s exactly what the developers were thinking of (the Star Wars training droids).
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/01jun_spheres.htm

@EdZ Yes, that is it. Great find. That is the footage, but I thought it was more spherical than that :blush:

I thought the same thing at first, but then realized the volume of compressed gas these things carry around must be considerable. In the event of a life support emergency, you don’t want all your oxygen stuck inside robots. Quick, everyone start sucking on the nearest droid!

On the other hand, CO2 needs to be removed from the air anyway. Why not pump it into these handy storage containters that just happen to also do usefull (eventually) work? Sure they will let it back out into the air, but it will just keep getting recycled anyway.

I had the privilege to play with these things while working at Kennedy Space Center. I have to say that they are quite fun. We had contests to see who could hold the bot the stillest. The steadier you are in holding it in your hand, the less often it sends out bursts from it’s co2 valves (which btw are just paintball gun solenoids :P )

I think co2 was used out of ease. The SPHERES group mentioned that the modified paintball parts were not intended for a final micro-satellite design and was only used for their prototype spheres. Most of their objectives are not in the physical bot anyways, their research is in the coordination and navigation of them in three-space. It’s more about developing the pathing algorithms, which can be used on bots of any configuration later.

Well, they can’t fly on Earth, but those videos are sped up to about 2x

Is it just me, or has that guy started to dance around from all the CO2 dizziness?

I thought the guy was having a fit before I realised it was a time lapse video.