NASA is testing an artificial intelligence-powered robotic system designed to help astronauts with routine maintenance and medical support without waiting for instructions from mission control.
The agency's Human Research Program, its Johnson Space Center robotics team and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the system with Google Public Sector, the arm of Google that sells cloud and AI tools to government agencies.
Communication delays with Mars can stretch to 44 minutes round-trip, making autonomous support increasingly necessary as NASA's Artemis program pushes toward harder Moon missions and eventual Mars trips.
The robot is designed primarily as a payload handler, managing cargo, logistics and equipment, and switching to medical support when needed, such as retrieving and preparing an ultrasound machine for an astronaut with suspected kidney stones.
In early lab demonstrations at Johnson Space Center's iMETRO facility, the robot hit an 85% baseline success rate locating and moving a medical bag, using the open-source Pi0 model from Physical Intelligence, run on Google Cloud infrastructure.
Google's team trained and fine-tuned the 4-billion parameter model on Google Cloud G4 computing instances in 2.5 hours.
The project builds on the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant, an earlier NASA-Google collaboration developed in 2025 that gave astronauts real-time clinical guidance when a doctor or Earth contact was unavailable.
"The ultimate goal is to build a robotic system that can execute a variety of tasks via simple voice instructions, under the astronauts' direct supervision and command," Jim Kelly, vice president of federal sales at Google Public Sector, wrote in a blog post.
Kelly said the robot could assist with routine health monitoring, such as capturing vitals or simple ultrasounds, under the direction of a human crew medical officer, without replacing human decision-making.
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