Fedor, the humanoid robot whose identification number is Skybot F850, departed last Thursday from Moscow. It did so aboard the Soyouz rocket, which was launched from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and became the first of its kind that Russia has sent beyond Earth.
“Go! Go!” said the humanoid robot just at the moment of liftoff, recalling a famous expression of Yuri Gagarin during his first space voyage in 1961. Fedor is due to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, where he will remain for 10 days, that is, until September 7. The rocket used for this mission is equipped with a digital control system and state-of-the-art engines.
The humanoid robot with abilities very similar to those of people.
His 160-kilogram silver anthropomorphic body is 6’5″ tall. Fedor is not only a Russian name, but also an acronym meaning “Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research”.
This humanoid robot has accounts on Instagram and Twitter, and from there he narrates his daily life boasting about his feats, among which are, for example, learning how to open a bottle of water. Inside the ISS, Fedor carries out different tasks which are supervised by Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, who has been on the Space Station since last month.
The idea is for Fedor to test his capabilities in extremely low gravity conditions. For this reason, one of its main abilities is to imitate human movements with the idea of being able to help astronauts in their work, especially those that have to be carried out in very complicated conditions. This is why it is even capable of using a screwdriver and various wrenches.
https://youtu.be/hRt2VYjAy4c
Evgueni Dudorov, head of the company that created Fedor, explained days before the humanoid robot left on this mission:
“The robot will have to perform five or six tasks that are secret.”
Finally, beyond this mission of which very little is known for now, the Russian authorities do not hide their ambitions for the humanoid robot and its future siblings. These machines could perform dangerous operations, such as exits into space.
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