Emotion-sensing robot heads to International Space Station to help with astronauts' mental health
- CIMON 2, an intelligent robot equipped with emotion-sensing voice detectors, was launched on Thursday aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket
- The spherical droid can recognise emotions, socialise with crew members and help mitigate group think
An intelligent robot equipped with emotion-sensing voice detectors was headed to the International Space Station after launching from Florida on Thursday, becoming the latest artificial intelligence-powered astronaut workmate in orbit.
The Crew Interactive Mobile Companion 2 (CIMON 2) is a spherical droid with microphones, cameras and a slew of software to enable emotion recognition.
The droid was among 5,700 pounds (2,585kg) of supplies and experiments aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, whose midday launch had been delayed from Wednesday due to high winds.
“The overall goal is to really create a true companion. The relationship between an astronaut and CIMON is really important,” Matthias Biniok, the lead architect for CIMON 2, told Reuters. “It’s trying to understand if the astronaut is sad, is he angry, joyful and so on.”
Based on algorithms built by information technology giant IBM Corp and data from CIMON 1, a nearly identical prototype that launched in 2018, CIMON 2 will be more sociable with crew members. It will test technologies that could prove crucial for future crewed missions in deep space, where long-term isolation and communication lags to Earth pose risks to astronauts’ mental health.
While designed to help astronauts conduct scientific experiments, the English-speaking robot is also being trained to help mitigate groupthink – a behavioural phenomenon in which isolated groups of humans can be driven to make irrational decisions.