A year ago this week, the third to last Space Shuttle mission, STS-133 finally launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida after a delay of almost 4 months to address technical issues.

On board the shuttle was a crate containing a Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot co-developed by +NASA and engineers from +General Motors. What makes R2 different from other robots like Honda's Asimo is that it was designed to do actual work alongside humans both on the International Space Station and eventually in factories here on earth.

That means it is a lot stronger than Asimo which can do some fancy dance moves, but can't lift much weight.

In October 2010 when I was working on product and technology communications for GM, I went down to Florida to support some media events in conjunction with the original planned launch date. The second R2 prototype was being used to demonstrate the robot's capabilities. You can see most of the demo in this video with NASA engineer Nicholas Radford.

A few days ago, the crew on board the ISS finally powered up R2 and began the testing of its control systems in micro-gravity. http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/16/2802290/nasa-robonaut-human-robot-handshake-iss

#robonaut2 #r2 #iss #nasa #generalmotors #gm

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