In partnership with NASA, Sony's PlayStation VR is being used by human operators to practice controlling a humanoid helper outside Earth's atmosphere.
While NASA works with Space X to get humans on Mars and the common man into space, Sony's PlayStation VR is helping put robonauts into outer space.
NASA has, in fact, successfully sent humanoid-like robots into space before. However, there was a problem with controlling the robonaut all the way from Earth.
Through the use of virtual reality hardware and software, the controller can literally be in two places at once. With a VR headset like the PlayStation VR, NASA's astronauts can sit safely here on the planet while a robot does the rest of the heavy lifting maybe somewhere on the International Space Station, for example.
The product of the partnership between NASA and Sony has resulted in the Mighty Morphenaut (which, incidentally, sounds quite familiar to the "Might Morphin' Power Rangers" where humans also control larger-than-life robots).
The Mighty Morphenaut, for now, is just a demo that puts an operator in the shoes of a robot in space. In the demo, the robot is aboard a space shuttle and the operator is given the opportunity to learn how to get the robonaut to complete a task, like flipping a switch or maneuver around floating obstacles at a safe distance.
To do these activities, NASA's operators strap a PlayStation VR headset on their heads and take hold of a pair of PlayStation Move controllers. The headset allows them to see what the robot would "see" and the controllers enable them to take over the robonaut's hands. In the video below, it looks fairly easy to control, but that may change in a real-world scenario. The distance between the operator here on Earth and the robot in space would cause an amount of input delay.
Being NASA of course, the VR demo does take the delay into account by allowing the operator to see a ghost resemblance of their hands moving without the delay, while the robot's hands are reflected shortly afterwards. The problem of lag gets more difficult to solve, however, when interacting with objects in motion. That hasn't been accounted for just yet.
It might be quite some time before the Mighty Morphenaut moves to operating in space, but for now, virtual reality should eventually help make it a reality in future space travel and operation.
