Honda Wants to Put a Robotic Lab Assistant on Future Commercial Space Stations

What happened

Honda Wants to Put a Robotic Lab Assistant on Future Commercial Space Stations, according to Universe Today. Most of the public’s association with Honda is through their “mobility” products - i.e. But the company has an impressive track record of other technical achievements, not the least of which has been in robotics.

Now, it’s teaming up with space infrastructure firm Redwire to develop an automated laboratory support system for use on future commercial space stations. Ask anyone who’s ever worked on the International Space Station (ISS) and they will tell you the most limited resource is astronaut time.

While they are aboard, the humans on the ISS have essentially every minute of every day planned out for them. And some of those minutes are taken up with very mundane things like scanning barcodes for inventory management or swapping out biological sample trays. Astronauts are some of the most highly educated people in the world, and their time is extraordinarily valuable - but they also have to handle basic laboratory maintenance tasks onboard space stations because there is literally no one else to do it.