Nasa's Valkyrie Robotics Summary

In the article, “NASA’s Valkyrie robots set the table for human life on Mars,” by Matt O’Brien the author informs the reader of NASA’s plan, to send robots to Mars as part of a construction team that sets up structures for human explorers. But first NASA is trying to find new homes at universities where engineers can tinker with these robots. Their goal is to make these robots able to work independently and construct major structures for the colonization of Mars. That this is a major jump from a rover, which gets simple commands like “‘Go over there,’” or “‘Check out that rock’” each day to a humanoid robot that must build structures. That in the future, Platt said “‘A number of technological advancements,..., will soon make it possible for a robot such as Valkyrie to perform such tasks’, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who is part of the research team,” Platt also said, “Robotics has been making tremendous strides in the past five years. It’s one those situations where you work on the same problem for decades and decades, and something finally starts to happen. Maybe this is that time.”
Just one of these advancements is autonomous robots. The need for this is from “a time delay between communications from Earth to Mars…” For any situation that might occur, the operators and scientists will need the robots to act for themselves and not have any human influence. This could also be used to have robots in certain areas for emergencies that might happen. There is “a number of technological advancements, from faster computers to better machine-learning algorithms,..” needed to make this project work. All of which can be used for other technology, like better scanning equipment for search and rescue situations or diseases in a human body. The advancements achieved through this project are totally worth the amount of time, energy, and money