NASA, together with Google Public Sector, is testing an early prototype of a robotic system based on artificial intelligence. It is being considered as a potential assistant for astronauts on future long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars, but for now this is a matter of laboratory demonstrations, not a finished system for real flights.
The system is being developed with the participation of NASA's Human Research Program, roboticists from Johnson Space Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The project continues previous joint work by NASA and Google — the digital assistant Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), created to support astronauts in medical situations.
For Mars missions, the communications delay with Earth can reach approximately 44 minutes one way. That is why autonomous support tools are especially important for everyday tasks and medical needs; for lunar missions the communications delay is considerably shorter.
The prototype is a robotic system for handling cargo and equipment. When it is not occupied with logistics tasks, it is intended to be used for medical support — for example, to deliver and prepare an ultrasound device when an astronaut complains of severe back pain.
In early laboratory tests at Johnson Space Center, the prototype based on the Pi0 model from Physical Intelligence achieved a 85 percent success rate in one specific task: finding and moving a medical bag. This is a baseline result of an early demonstration, not an indicator that the robot is ready for full-fledged medical care or spaceflight.
Pi0 is an open vision-language-action model with approximately 4 billion parameters. It was fine-tuned on Google Cloud infrastructure over 2,5 hours, after which the system was able to perform the assigned task of finding and moving the medical bag.
"The end goal is to create a robotic system that performs tasks based on simple voice commands under the direct control of astronauts," noted Jim Kelly, vice president of Google Public Sector. The system is conceived as an assistant and does not replace human decision-making.
How such robots will be integrated into real space missions will be shown by further tests. NASA continues work on AI tools to support crews together with various partners; it is more accurate to speak of systems based on AI and agentic technologies rather than of a "superintelligence."
