An ethnographic study of CIMON
The first artificial intelligence created for Low Earth OrbitPepijn Deroo
Living on board the ISS for extended periods of time can make astronauts feel lonely and isolated, which is worsened by the often repetitive and tedious day-to-day tasks. To lighten these issues, the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) initiated project CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile companiON) in 2016. Developed by Airbus and IBM, this spherical, free-flying robot is meant to assist astronauts during experiments, perform dull tasks, such as taking pictures, and generally prove the benefits of robotic assistance and virtual social interaction in the ISS. Thanks to a low-latency downlink architecture to Earth, CIMON is able to process speech, find correct answers and generate spoken text itself using AI technology from IBM.
This presentation will discuss some of the findings from a 4-month long ethnographic study on the development of CIMON. Through interviews with various members of the CIMON project, the history of the project and the motivation behind many of CIMON’s key design features were reconstructed. As a first theme, the references made to CIMON’s namesake Prof. Simon Wright from the Captain Future pulp science fiction stories and anime are more closely examined. The research also indicates how CIMON has been uniquely designed for the ISS environment and how it opposes certain undesirable aspects of that environment. Finally, as the technologies used in CIMON to construct its credibility as a real social actor entail certain dangers, the complex nature of this construction is also investigated.
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