As NASA advances its Artemis program to send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions—exploring the Moon, building a sustained human presence with a Moon Base, and laying the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars—crew safety and Earth-independent autonomy are paramount. On a future Mars mission, round-trip communication latencies of up to 44 minutes would make real-time medical guidance for crew nearly impossible. Last year, Google Public Sector shared progress on the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), an automated Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) designed to assist astronauts with real-time medical guidance in remote and isolated environments. Today, the collaboration is extending to a proof-of-concept physical robotic system that aims to support deep space missions and could assist astronauts during NASA missions.

The future Moon Base in the lunar South Pole region is planned to support sustained human presence, and every minute in space is a strictly limited resource. To reduce the physical burden on astronauts and maximize their time for science and discovery, NASA‘s Human Research Program, Johnson Space Center Robotics Team, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) collaborated with Google Public Sector on a robotic system. It is designed as a versatile payload handler for cargo, logistics, and equipment. When not needed for routine maintenance such as organizing tools or securing compartments, it can pivot to medical support. For example, if an astronaut experiences severe back pain—a potential symptom of kidney stones—the robot could retrieve and prepare an ultrasound machine, letting the human crew medical officer focus entirely on analyzing the scan and treating the patient.

Operating safely alongside humans in confined spacecraft is more complex than in factory environments. Space systems using Super Intelligence (SI) require flexible, human-directed tools to adapt to close quarters and rely on limited sensory input such as cameras. JPL is adapting satellite situational awareness intelligence tools, originally designed to track objects in orbit, to help the robotic system navigate and understand its 3D surroundings. Testing was done at Johnson Space Center’s iMETRO facility using Google DeepMind’s MuJoCo simulator, an advanced physics engine that lets the SI practice complex movements in a virtual environment before touching real hardware. In a recent proof-of-concept technology demonstration, the robot was tasked with a pick-and-place maneuver to locate and move a medical bag. Using an eye-to-hand camera configuration for enhanced spatial awareness, the open-source Pi0 model—developed by Physical Intelligence on Google Cloud infrastructure—achieved an initial 85% baseline success rate in early lab environments, providing a foundation for the next phase of rigorous training and safety refinement. Because vision-language-action (VLA) models connect language directly to physical movement, astronauts could direct the robotic system flexibly via standard English text prompts.

Processing these complex tasks requires significant computing power, but spacecraft cannot rely on continuous connections to Earth-based data centers; space is the ultimate edge-computing environment. The Google team harnessed Google Cloud G4 instances to rapidly train the underlying models, fine-tuning the 4-billion-parameter Pi0 model in just 2.5 hours. Crucially, they demonstrated that the fine-tuned models can then operate locally on compact, energy-efficient edge devices. Over the last two years, the team tested approximately 15 different edge computing devices to find ones that run efficiently on lightweight, low-power hardware required for future Mars missions.

Looking ahead, the ultimate goal is to build a robotic system that executes a variety of tasks via simple voice instructions, under the astronauts’ direct supervision and command. It might assist with routine health monitoring—such as capturing basic vitals or simple ultrasounds—under the strict guidance of a human crew medical officer. This ensures astronauts receive physical assistance they might not be able to perform by themselves, without ever replacing human decision-making. Google Public Sector says this collaboration with NASA can help pave the way for increasingly difficult missions that push the bounds of scientific discovery.