The Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) at NASA Ames Research Center was tasked with upgrading an existing free flying robot, SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experiment) on the International Space Station (ISS). The SPHERES has been on ISS since 2006.
The lists of requirements that we needed to address were increasing processing, adding Wifi, touchscreen, and a camera. This narrowed our search down to smartphones, tablets, and iPod touch devices. The best option at the time was the Google Nexus S.
The process of making this smartphone ISS certified started in Dec 2010. This involved removing the GSM chip, making it run off of AA alkaline batteries, covering the touchscreen with Teflon tape, and changing the OS so that device drivers were not needed when plugged into the laptops on ISS. This was the first Smartphone certified for ISS and Shuttle. It was launched into space on STS-135 on 8th July 2011.
This started a series of experiments involving the smartphone and SPHERES. We called it Smart SPHERES. The experiments include sensor performance in 0g, verifying space to ground communications, live video survey and tele-operations, face detection and following, and Wifi localization.
The success of these experiments lead to follow up work using a Google Project Tango smartphone. In addition to the previous modification needed, we moved all the sensors to face the front, integrated the data cable to communicate to SPHERES, and used ADB over Wifi to upload/download data. This was launched into space on Orb-2 rocket on 14 July 2014.
The Tango smartphone allowed us to investigate localization without SPHERES by using a previously built map of ISS. This has lead to our current project of building a free flying robot for ISS called Astrobee.
