Oleg Saprykin, head of the manned programs department of the Roscosmos Institute, FSUE TsNIIMASH, believes that robots-avatars can be used to work on the lunar surface, which will be controlled by humans from Earth or from outer space.
According to the proposed concept, a mechanical robot-avatar is controlled through a kinematic feedback exoskeleton, which completely repeats the human body. Putting on an exoskeleton, a person “actually, as it were, plunges into the body of this avatar,” Saprykin explained during an earlier press conference on the manned space expedition to Mars.
“Using such a robot, it is possible, I would even say not virtually, but practically real, to travel in the solar system. First of all, on the Moon it is interesting to use it, because … What is the control of this robot on the Moon? In fact, with the delays that are now with the Moon - this is about 4 seconds - you can use the copy mode. A person will work with this robot in real time,”the scientist noted.
Earlier, the head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (CTC) named after Gagarin, Yuri Lonchakov, said that the Russian android robot is soon planned to be sent to the ISS.
The prototype of the SAR-401 android robot, developed by NPO Androidnaya Tekhnika in cooperation with FSUE TsNIIMASH, was presented in November 2013 in Star City. In the future, the company created a flight prototype that will be able to perform about 50 operations in outer space.