Super excited! Another inch closer to more viable space missions!<p>Instead of arguing about robot vs astronaut effectiveness, let's just use robot to augment astronaut where it can, and go from there!
It's great to see automation save on expensive human labor for taking picture. Now the trick is to automate a lot of the human labor up there. No need waste tons of money for what amounts to glorified lab assistants.
First association <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afHt_1sVQ14" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afHt_1sVQ14</a>
Love the robot, but I'm uncomfortable at what I see as an implication in the article that now the astronauts should stop taking pictures and do more productive things instead.<p>I'm pretty sure there's values to that activity beyond having photographic registrations to show afterwards. (I'm also not convinced the little ball of cuteness is anywhere close to matching their choice of scenes yet)
Wait they finally came out with the drone? I remember this was being teased when the ISS first launched. This is awesome! NASA / JAXA should make a plush toy or regular drone that could be used on the ground for fundraising.
NASA is working on a similar (but more capable and larger) robot right now, with plans to open-source all the code. I'm curious what the internals of JAXA's robot look like. That thing is pretty small.