Icarus robotics Co-founders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts to understand how they felt working in space when they started their business. Their big takeaway: This work is often more important than cutting-edge science.
“We are Amazon warehouse workers with a PhD,” said an astronaut. If an experiment takes two hours at a station, it continues, spending the first 90 minutes on cargo and preparation tools.
This is a miserable waste of top talents. “These two-year-old astronauts come from some of the craziest military backgrounds, as well as some of the smartest and most trained people on Earth, took 14 days to unpack, repack and move them around,” Barajas said.
Logistical burden is related to cargo replenishment. Every 60 days or so, about three and a half tons of cargo arrive at the International Space Station, all of which must be opened and stored.
Barajas and Palmer met at the entrepreneurs’ first organization and they knew there had to be a better way. Their tone: Use clever, dexterous robots to take over these vague trivia. But they don’t start with humanoid robots. Instead, Icarus took an iterative approach and started with a simpler, fan-style robot with two robot arms with chin grippers.
Icarus has just raised a $6.1 million seed round led by Soma Capital and Xtal and has been involved there from Nebular and big Tech Ventures.
The appearance of the first robot is a function of the task it will perform: unzip and store goods. Palmer brings the expertise of robots to the enterprise, saying that when you move a two-person operation or coordinate using two robot arms at once, you can get about 80% of the flexibility you need with simple jaw grip (with complex anthropomorphic hands).
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On ISS, astronauts who perform many scientific experiments on ISS are also simple in practice, such as swapping cartridges, another area where robotic labor might come in handy.
The team recently conducted a long-distance demonstration on land using a double-layer jaw gripper system, unpacking a real ISS bag, unpacking it, and pulling it back again. “We can prove that you don’t need to go all out to get meaningful flexibility for long distances,” Palmer said.
Next is the flight test. Icarus plans to conduct a parabolic flight campaign in the new year, and then conducts a one-year demonstration at ISS through the operator of Business Bishop Airlock, Voyager Space. The plan is to spend a year lowering the entire kit of cargo bag operations and then step into more refined tasks associated with station maintenance, such as filter and seal inspections.
At first the robot will be requisitioned, Palmer said the International Space Station is one of the few places where you can always have someone “on the wheel” the robot. “The labor arbitrage is so large” that Icarus can have a year of skilled, highly paid robot operators.
Icarus’ life terminology program is to build autonomous and universal capabilities through “embodied AI.” It reflects what is happening in general robotics on the ground and is adjusted to microgravity physics. This means collecting data on microgravity through humans in a loop and transforming that dataset into a fundamental model of On Orbit robotics.
From there, Icarus aims to introduce part of human autonomy in choosing “high-level primitives,” a set of simplified to smart commands such as “open bags” or “unlock items.”
Ultimately, the goal is complete autonomy over long-distance deep space areas, where it is not feasible and can supplement human space activities.
“We don’t want to remove astronauts,” said Barajas, who boarded his first NASA internship at the age of 17. “We want to expand them. We want to make money and research as much as possible in a short time on the station.”
