Nakanose noted that as the competition between China and the U.S. The Gitai R1 rover at work in the desert. increasingly looks to mine in-space minerals. It was also able to successfully mine materials in a test of its excavation abilities, which will be particularly valuable as the U.S. It successfully installed solar panels, placed an antenna at a high place, welded a panel and towed equipment during that test. Gitai brought the R1 rover out to the desert (on Earth, about the closest simulation we can get to moon terrain) to continue testing its function. Gitai sent a version of its autonomous space robot arm to the ISS and installed it inside an airlock, where the arm conducted various tests including operating switches and cables and assembling panels.Īnd recently, the R1 lunar rover was put to the test on Earth. The robotic arm was tested on the International Space Station in October 2021. Nakanose said the arms and their “hands” can hold a variety of tools and handle tasks including solar panel assembly to provide power to spacecraft, repairs, transferring payloads, and helping spacecraft dock. Robotic arms are widely used in automated manufacturing, and just like on Earth they can serve a wide range of purposes in space. These people are diligently working on constructing Gitai’s two main products – a robotic arm and hand, and specialized lunar rovers. In December 2022 the company took up office in Torrance, and now employs roughly 50 people in the region. Gitai is a Japanese company, founded by CEO Sho Nakanose in 2016. In the future, these robots could be responsible for maintaining not just satellites and space stations, but also bases and maybe one day entire colonies on other planets. Gitai, a relatively new entrant into Los Angeles’ space ecosystem, wants its industrial bots to be a key part of settling the final frontier. The easiest solution, rather than risking human life to build out space systems architecture, is to send up robots capable of handling it for us. But there’s one problem with this ambition: building in space is both costly and extremely dangerous. One of the space industry’s long-term goals beyond landing humans back on the Moon and other planets is to create an infrastructure in space that can house a number of people living and working in orbit.
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