thewardour.com

Unfortunately, this system hinges on whether the Rovio is in range of the navigation antenna which sits atop its charging dock. This means that going outside of that range (which happens every time it leaves the room where the dock is) your instructions are lost–even though you can still control the unit over its Wi-Fi connection.

Robots may be the eventual downfall of the human race, but for now, most are either cute or useful. One that exists in both categories has spent the last week lurking quietly in a darkened corner of my house, watching my every move. Did I mention I’m happy about this?

Out of the box putting together the Rovio is a relative breeze. The only tool you need is a screwdriver. You also need to aim its charging base station’s infrared lights on your ceiling so that the Rovio can re-find its home if it gets lost or needs to re-align itself. Setting this up takes only a few seconds, then you never have to mess with it again. You also need to download software that enables you to connect your computer directly to the Rovio and pass along your network settings.

Is it worth it?

Included is a control grid that lets you rotate the robot a predetermined number of degrees in one direction or the other. Or you can hit one of the four-way directional buttons to get it moving forward, backward, or side to side. Its big trick though is that it also lets you drag your mouse as if you were using an analog control stick, which controls how fast it moves in any one direction. This provides a very fluid-like feeling when maneuvering it around your house.

The good:
• Very little hardware setup required
• Battery is rechargeable and included (Rovio unit also heads back to its dock when it needs to recharge)
• Easy to use navigation controls that don’t require software installation
• Built-in camera and microphone allow you to talk to people on the other side
• Can be used for both home surveillance, and as a toy

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

This movement recording system is actually one of the easiest things to set up, although quite limited unless you’re willing to shell out for additional hardware. By design it’s able to record your instructions, so that you can simply click a button and have the bot re-execute them for you. Doing so requires just two button presses: one to begin recording, and another to end. You can then name it something memorable like “kitchen check.”

The video:

The Rovio’s control system is managed entirely in a Web browser. You control all of its movements with a cockpit of controls that lets you perform a number of tasks without any special training. In other words, you don’t need to read the manual.

The bad:
• Setting up router for use outside your home can be difficult
• Does not record video, can only take and e-mail image stills
• Video is on the dark side, and built-in light doesn’t help much
• Can get stuck easily on household objects
• Super bright blue LED lights on Rovio body cannot be turned off without a bit of hackery
• Limited camera angle control
• Noisy

The Rovio's wheels have wheels of their own which allow the unit to go in any direction.

While I experienced some troubles getting it to work on my home router, it might end up working better with your setup. What may end up being the real hard part is getting your roommates, or significant other okay with the idea of having a robot in your house, watching your every move.

The robot in question is the Rovio, which made its debut at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show. From an Internet-connected computer, you can drive the $250 robot around your house, watch it from the built-in camera, and talk to people in your house through the mic and speaker. For all intents and purposes it’s a toy, but it’s also got the makings of a very capable telepresence machine.

Usefulness

So could something like this be useful for watching over your house from a security perspective? I alluded to as much in a previous story on home security via Webcam, but in truth the Rovio has not been designed for such a purpose. For instance, it cannot record video or be setup to detect motion, or sound as some Web cams, and Web cam software are able to provide. This means it can’t be set up to greet an unwelcome intruder, or alert you to the fact.

The control panel also gives you three choices for how you want its camera angled. The default has it sitting flat, but you can also have it move up a few inches (while still staying level), or going up in a 45 degree angle that lets you sneak a peak at the ceiling. Out of the three I found the middle to be the sweet spot, but I often found myself wanting something closer to a periscope that would let me control the camera on its own instead of having to maneuver the entire device.

What may be more difficult is getting it to work with your home network–at least it was for me.

One of the only problems I ran into was port management. While the Rovio worked fine from my house, I couldn’t access it from work, or other computers outside of my local network without first opening up the proper ports. This can be easy or difficult depending on your router. For me it was the former since I was using Apple’s Time Capsule, which does not support Universal Plug and Play–something the Rovio can make use of to very quickly open up those ports without you having to do any fiddling.

One thing it can do though is be programmed to go out on missions around your house without you having to provide any sort of telemetry instructions. Your standard tilt and pan Web cam can’t do that.

Considering that the price of a good, high-end wireless pan-and-tilt Webcam runs about the same price as the Rovio (and in some cases, even more), it’s pretty neat that you can get one that does many of the same things–but with wheels. It’s lacking some important home security tools like video recording, and motion, sound, and thermal detection, but it makes up for it with features like the built-in microphone and speaker.

For my house, the range radius was around 25 feet, which limited the unit to my dining room. From there I could get a quick peek at both of the doors leading into my house, but that left two rooms and a hallway unseen. That’s not to say you can’t visit those places; as long as it has a Wi-Fi connection you get complete control. It’s just that those actions that go outside of the navigation signal can’t be recorded as part of the path.

If you’ve long wanted to relive childhood aspirations of becoming an expert R/C toy controller, and want to give your house a look when you’re not there, this is a hearty piece of equipment that will fulfill both those needs. Just keep in mind that extending some of its advanced navigation functions to other parts of your house will cost extra. And it cannot currently handle stairs.

Setup

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

As a solution, WowWee offers additional navigation beacons you can set up inside of your house that extend how far you can go with it. These cost $30 per unit and require a dedicated power source and some additional setup. Again, if you’re only planning to use this in something like a large living room, you won’t need to shell out. But if you’re looking to buy a Rovio to autonomously cover your entire house, there are some costs involved.

Unlike traditional Web cams, or mounted security cameras, the Rovio is mobile. It has a built-in Wi-Fi antenna and three wheels that have little wheels of their own. This design means it cannot handle stairs, but it does let it move in any direction without a lot of back and forth cornering like you’d get with a vacuum. All the while you can watch everything it’s seeing in streaming VGA-quality video.

Founder Loic Le Meur also announced that 2.5 million people have now downloaded Seesmic Desktop, and that Seesmic has partnered with Twitter image-sharing app Yfrog to be its default image provider. It’s the second partnership deal for Yfrog in a month, having inked a deal with URL shortener Bitly a few weeks ago. That’s probably disconcerting news for Yfrog rival Twitpic, once the unequivocal big player in Twitter image uploads.

(Credit:
Loic Le Meur / Seesmic)

There are a handful of Twitter apps out there that can also update Facebook statuses, and no clear market leader, but the new build (version 0.6) of Seesmic Desktop may soon be the app of choice for marketers who use Twitter and Facebook for brand promotion. That’s because it can now manage activity on Facebook’s “fan pages” as well as personal profiles, meaning that the operators of these pages can update them in sync with Twitter accounts.

The new Seesmic Desktop app lets Facebook fan page managers update them in sync with Twitter.

“With the Facebook Page feature, you have greater control on how you market your business, oversee your brand, listen to your fans and build your community,” a release from Seesmic explained. Facebook, it should be noted, has launched its own feature to push fan page updates directly to Twitter.

Seesmic Desktop was built after parent company Seesmic, which had previously built a video-commenting company, acquired Twitter desktop app Twhirl.

If you’re an ordinary Facebook user who doesn’t manage any fan pages, Seesmic Desktop can also track status posts from those that you subscribe to.

OneApp is Microsoft’s plan for developing markets for the here and now. Longer-term, Microsoft has been exploring a concept called “phone plus,” in which a smartphone could be plugged into a television and keyboard to act as a sort of basic computer.

“Right now my team is extremely focused on emerging markets,” Mital said. “There’s literally billions of customers in these markets.”

The software, known as OneApp, is due out later this year and should allow people in emerging markets to access services like Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger using the kinds of inexpensive phones most often sold for $20 or $30. Microsoft said Blue Label Telecoms in South Africa will be the first to use OneApp and will use it to offer phones that ship with a dozen mobile applications, including a mobile wallet program as well as the social-networking tools.

While not an operating system, OneApp is a software environment within which many kinds of programs can run. The key to OneApp, Microsoft said, is the fact that the applications and data run largely from the cloud. That means that OneApp can run on phones with rather meager memory and processing abilities. OneApp itself takes up only about 150 kilobytes of memory, as opposed to the many megabytes often used on programs for smartphones. Individual applications can be as small as 10 to 15 kilobytes.

“People have used them just for voice and SMS” (Short Message Service), Mital said. “What we want to do is unlock their power so they can be used from a broader set of services and applications.”

Microsoft has been working on OneApp for the past year and a half, noting that there are hundreds of millions of feature phones in emerging markets, most of which aren’t being used to run software.

Mital said that the big advantage of OneApp is that programs written for it should run on most OneApp-enabled phones, something he said is often not the case with Java.

“If you build an app for one phone it may or may not work on another phone,” Mital said. “The development cost is extremely excessive. You go through the development cycle over and over. That is just debilitating.”

The move comes as Microsoft is also struggling to keep up in the smartphone race against heightened competition from the likes of Apple, Google, Research In Motion, and others. Microsoft said that OneApp is separate from its Windows Mobile efforts.

Although there are plenty of feature phones still shipping in developed markets, such as the United States and Europe, Mital said Microsoft is focusing on emerging markets.

A mock-up of OneApp running on a feature phone allowing access to Facebook and other applications.

For now, Microsoft is working directly with select partners to develop OneApp, but eventually Microsoft plans to release a software development kit to allow others to write their own OneApp programs. Programs for OneApp can be written using tools like XML and JavaScript, Mital said. “The world does not need another new programming paradigm. We were very determined to use existing programming paradigms.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Mital stressed that OneApp is an adjunct to Windows Mobile, which is still the company’s bet for smartphones, and is largely aimed at emerging markets, rather than developed ones.

“When you launch an application, (OneApp) only loads the part of the application that you want,” said Amit Mital, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft’s “unlimited potential” unit, which focuses on emerging markets. “We use very intelligent and sophisticated caching. The rest of it sits in the cloud.”

With OneApp, Microsoft will find itself competing against applications written for Sun’s J2ME.

Microsoft on Monday announced plans for mobile software that aims to allow people in emerging markets to access various Internet programs using lower-end feature phones.

In addition to Blue Label Telecoms, which is launching shortly, Mital said that Microsoft hopes to announce one or two more carriers using OneApp before the end of the year.

So far, Apple has said only “September.” Recent rumors have indicated it might be ready earlier than that, but it’s mid-August now, so that’s mostly inconsequential. No matter what, it’s going to be available before Windows 7 is set to roll out on October 22. When it’s available, we’ll be sure to let you know.

What’s the one killer feature worth upgrading for?

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

According to rumors, the release of Mac OS X 10.6, Apple’s operating system also known as Snow Leopard, might arrive a bit early. Though Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June that Snow Leopard would hit stores in September, tech blogs became overly excited when it was whispered that it might be ready to debut on or about August 28.

Some people are fans of waiting until the first update, the 0.1 release, which tends to correct any of the immediate issues that inevitably pop up when a new operating system is released to the public. Some who attempted to upgrade to the first version of Leopard ran into trouble after the software was installed, and when they attempted to restart their machines a blue screen would appear instead. But it appeared to hinge on a specific piece of third-party software many had installed that was out of date. The majority had a smooth transition to Leopard.

Expose, an operating system UI feature for organizing open application windows, or just the windows from a particular application currently running, gets tweaked a bit too. In Snow Leopard, Expose is integrated with app icons in the dock, which cuts out the need to first switch to the specific application you want before activating Expose to see its open windows. It also means you don’t have to use a keyboard, or use a trackpad gesture to call it up. Clicking and holding an app’s icon will bring all windows open that are associated with that program to the front.

Many people will probably consider support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 the most important new feature of Snow Leopard. Improved Exchange support will be integrated into Mail, iCal, and Address Book in Snow Leopard, which means e-mail, calendar appointments, to-do lists, and contacts from Outlook will be viewable on your personal calendar, mail, and address books. It also allows things like dragging and dropping contacts into iCal to schedule meetings, and your Mac will be able to discover time conflicts between personal and work calendars and change the meeting time and location.

How much?

Apple's Bertrand Serlet outlines changes to Mac OS X 10.6 at WWDC.

First thing to know: This is not a complete overhaul of Mac OS X. Rather, it’s a series of small to medium-sized improvements, what Apple calls “refinements.” Much of the new shine to OS X 10.6 comes from changes that are under the surface, possibly not obvious to the unobservant. But Apple does say that the improvements make the overall OS much faster, including a 45-percent faster installation than the previous version of the operating system, OS X 10.5, or Leopard. Apple is also promising faster boot times, quicker shut down, a speedier process when joining wireless networks, and faster backups to Time Machine. And it’s not just quicker, Apple says, it’s lighter: Upon install it frees up 6GB of space.

Specific applications have been tinkered with as well, with a lot of attention focused on Quicktime, Expose, and a shiny new Safari 4 browser, which was released in June. For more on that, see here.

What’s the difference between Snow Leopard and Leopard?

Is it worth upgrading right away, or should I wait?

Quicktime gets a mysterious new version number, and is now called Quicktime X. It’s a bit slicker, and the new interface appears similar to the iPhone’s media player. The real change is that many features that were previously in the Pro version of Quicktime are now in the free version. You will be able to edit video inside QuickTime using a video timeline ribbon that appears along the bottom of the screen. And there will be fewer steps involved in video uploading. You don’t have to worry about file formats–Quicktime will do any necessary conversion and upload directly to video-hosting sites or MobileMe, Apple’s subscription service that syncs personal files on any of its devices. Apple promises it will take just one click to record audio or video (on a Mac’s built-in mic or camera) with the new Quicktime. It will also support HTTP streaming of a wider variety of file formats (like h.264 and AAC). It’s a feature that many competing media players have long offered, and it automatically adjusts the playback bit rate according to what the connection can handle. It also means you can stream video or audio through more firewalls.

Related: Microsoft is improving its Exchange support for the Mac too. This week Microsoft said that Outlook for Mac will replace Entourage, the current e-mail and calendar program in the Mac Office suite. Although it will still differ from the Windows version of Outlook, it will add support for more Exchange features, such as public folders and rights management features.

Overall, we think this will be a worthwhile upgrade if the speed claims turn out to be true. Another way of looking at is that for the price of the Quicktime to Quicktime Pro upgrade, you get most of the Quicktime Pro features plus a newly tweaked core OS. We think it’s a good deal for Apple OS X 10.5 users.

Apple surprised people by putting the price to upgrade to Snow Leopard at a very attractive $29 for a single license, and $49 for a five-user family pack. But there’s a catch: you have to already have Leopard installed to pay those prices. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you’ll have to pay $169, which includes an upgrade to 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard). For a 5-user family pack license, it’ll cost $229. And Snow Leopard is only compatible with Macs containing Intel chips. On the OS front, Leopard is the end of the line for PowerPC Mac owners.

When will it be available?

How much does it matter that it could arrive five whole days before September officially begins? It doesn’t. Regardless of when the operating system ships, here’s what to expect from Snow Leopard, and why it might matter to you.

Abu Dhabi’s planned green community, Masdar City, will be testing General Electric’s smart appliances in a handful of residences and coordinating them with its power grid, GE said Monday.

The installation, to be completed in early 2010, will include a communication system between the appliances and Masdar City’s utility grid that will allow the appliances to transmit real-time data and run nonessential functions during off-peak usage hours. Since Masdar City is not scheduled to be fully inhabited until 2013, the city’s grid will simulate peak usage strains in order to test the system.

A refrigerator equipped with a “smart” meter, for example, communicates with the local power utility. That refrigerator then waits to run its automatic defrost cycle until it has received a signal from the electrical grid that it’s an off-peak period.

Previously, GE began testing its smart appliances in select homes in Louisville, Ky., in conjunction with the Louisville Gas and Electric Company.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

GE’s Consumer & Industrial division announced in October 2008 that it was developing home appliances that could ease the strain on electrical grids by coordinating with a grid’s off-peak hours to perform flexible functions.

The two-year pilot project with GE appliances will include refrigerators, stoves, and European-style washer/dryer machines that run on 220volt/50HZ platforms and will be installed in 10 residences.

Masdar City is under construction in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It aims to be the first carbon-neutral and zero-waste city. It’s also home to the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The post-graduate research center, a collaborator with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began offering courses and research facilities in alternative energy and sustainable technology for graduate students in September.

A smart meter on a refrigerator at GE's labs.

The conclusion of the deal had been postponed because of delays in obtaining regulatory approval from the European Commission.

To ease the transfer, Toshiba will initially own 80 percent of TSDC, with the remaining 20 percent owned by Fujitsu. By December of 2010, Fujitsu will give up its entire share, making TSDC a wholly owned Toshiba subsidiary.

First announced in February, the agreement moves Fujitsu’s former hard-drive business into a new Toshiba subsidiary company called Toshiba Storage Device Corp., or TSDC.

Fujitsu and Toshiba announced on Thursday that they have completed the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard-drive business to Toshiba.

Facing intense competition from rivals Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi, Toshiba is hoping to carve out a bigger slice of the hard-drive market. The company said it’s looking to capture hard-drive sales of 600 billion yen ($6.7 billion) by its fiscal year ending March 2012 and win 20 percent of the market for the year ending March 2016.

Therefore Microsoft has launched its first-ever TV ad for Cashback, a nifty system that gives you a little money when you buy something vital–such as sneakers or a camera–through a Bing search.

It does seem like splendidly commercial bribery. However, I do wish that the ad might have been a little less prosaic and a little more inspiring.

And it understands you so well in these times of penury and desperation that it knows you have certain vulnerabilities that might be worth exploring: the vulnerabilities that lurk in the area around your pocket.

The new Bing Dynasty desperately wants you to love it.

Still, you know that even with this mundane execution, it won’t be hard for some to decide that binging for your supper is better than singing for it.

You see, if you’re a decision engine rather than a search engine, you have to aspire to higher goals. It really isn’t enough to produce an ad that might have been the work of JC Penney or KMart in one of their more awkward moments.

Bribery should be alluring, not merely an everyday solution to an annoying practical problem.

I would have preferred something that stirred the emotions, rather than something that feels like it’s going through the motions.

Between becoming a social TV service, and its start as a CMS for enterprise users, one of the company’s most interesting products was its consumer publishing platform. This would let anyone grab all types of media and mash them up into a single player that could be syndicated in various channels–regardless of the content type. This meant you could mix videos, photos, audio clips, and even RSS feeds.

“At each turn, we moved from what ultimately proved to be a declining market opportunity to a larger opportunity,” Berkley said. “We have a lot to be proud of. In addition we have a lot of lessons learned to humbly take with us as we move on.”

SplashCast's Social TV player would let users watch TV shows and embed them on their social-networking pages.

Five-year-old start-up SplashCast Media will be shutting down in the next few weeks. Co-founder and CEO Michael Berkley put out a company blog post earlier this week detailing the various directions the company had taken, going from an enterprise content management tool, all the way to a video player that was integrated with social networks like Facebook and MySpace–none of which were enough to keep it afloat.

It was one of the few products at the time that would actually let you get away with such a hodgepodge in a single package. This later developed into a professional publishing platform the company was unable to charge for, which definitely serves as a good example for other companies who may one day expect to charge for services that are currently being offered free of charge.

Previous coverage:
SplashCast: Share everything in one place
SplashCast gets a little more social, bird-like
SplashCast and NPR do podcast player, Facebook app
SplashCast launching ultrasocial video player tomorrow
SplashCast launches MyPodcastNetwork

Berkley noted that one of the leading causes for the demise was publishers not wanting to pay to use its technology, which had previously been offered for free. He also said that the VC community was not willing to “bet” on the company, despite it picking up a $4 million Series A funding in late March last year.

(Credit:
CNET)

Reports are surfacing that Twitter users’ updates are showing up on their Facebook walls, quite against their wishes.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Twitter previously developed a Facebook app for users of both services that takes in a user’s Twitter content and posts it on Facebook. Apparently a lot of people installed it but left it turned off, and now Facebook is, in error, ignoring the setting and letting the app do what it was designed to do even if users don’t want it.

There are also reports that the same thing is happening with the Friendfeed app, which quite complicates things since many people give Friendfeed itself access to their Twitter feeds.

Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users.

Update, 11:40 PM: Facebook released this statement:

Consensus seems to be that a Facebook bug is causing the platform to ignore users’ “off” settings on their Twitter and Friendfeed apps. A solution is to block the offending applications (Twitter, Friendfeed) from accessing your profile.

To turn off erroneous Twitter updates in Facebook, block the Twitter app.

Final approach will begin at a point about 3.1 miles directly behind the International Space Station. The HTV-1 will maneuver itself to a position about 1,000 feet below the lab complex and then carry out a 180-degree yaw maneuver to permit an abort, if necessary, when the craft is closer to the station.

“The launch was beautiful,” Stephen Clark, a U.S. journalist representing Spaceflight Now, said in an instant message from Tanegashima. “The boosters lit with the typical orange glow and away she went. The rocket went into a thick cloud layer around 25 seconds after liftoff, but the rumble shook us for a couple minutes more.”

At that point, with the HTV-1 in free drift, station flight engineer Nicole Stott will use the lab’s robot arm to lock onto a grapple fixture. Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk then will take over and guide the HTV-1 to a docking at the Harmony module’s nadir, or Earth-facing, port.

Unlike Russian Progress supply ships of the European Space Agency’s automated transfer vehicle, or ATV, the Japanese HTV features a pressurized section accessible by the station crew and an unpressurized cargo bay to carry experiments and hardware that can be mounted on the station’s hull.

JAXA currently plans to build and launch one HTV craft per year, although the agency could support two flights annually if necessary.

The HTV cargo craft, developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, as a contribution to the station program, measures some 32 feet long, 14.4 feet wide and weighs some 23,000 pounds when carrying a full 13,200-pound load of cargo. For its maiden flight, the HTV-1 is carrying about 3.5 metric tons of equipment and supplies.

The $680 million mission represents a critical milestone for the post-shuttle space station program as NASA and its international partners work to keep the lab complex resupplied after the space shuttle is retired late next year.

The Japanese space agency launched a powerful new rocket Thursday carrying an unmanned space station cargo ship on a complex maiden voyage to deliver some 7,400 pounds of equipment and supplies to the orbital outpost.

Not only is the flight a maiden voyage for the HTV, it also was the maiden flight of Japan’s new H-2B rocket, a much more powerful version of JAXA’s hydrogen-fueled H-2A booster. The new rocket features four strap-on solid-fuel boosters instead of two, and two hydrogen-fueled first-stage engines instead of one. The upper stage features a single hydrogen-powered engine.

The HTV-1 flight plan calls for a full week of orbital tests and checkout before final approach to the space station, including tests to exercise the craft’s abort modes. Capture is planned for flight day eight.

A computer-generated graphic depicting the HTV cargo ship ready for grapple by the space station's robot arm.

The day after capture, the crew will open hatches between Harmony and the HTV and begin moving equipment and supplies into the station.

One of the payloads in the HTV’s unpressurized cargo bay is a NASA experiment to map the constituents of the upper atmosphere and the other is a JAXA payload designed to study the effects of trace gases on the ozone layer. Both will be extracted from the HTV cargo bay by the station’s robot arm and installed on an external porch by a Japanese robot arm on the Kibo lab module.

With four strap-on boosters gushing white-hot exhaust and a pair of hydrogen-fueled main engines roaring at full throttle, the H-2B rocket thundered away from launch pad 2 at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan at 1:01:46 p.m. EDT.

“On this particular flight, we’ve got about 2 1/2 tons of pressurized cargo flying to orbit and almost a metric ton of payloads externally coming to ISS,” space station Program Manager Mike Suffredini said at a pre-launch briefing. “So it’s a significant amount of up mass to us and it’s not only important logistics for the crew, which is a major part of the pressurized capability, but also quite a bit of payloads.”

(Credit:
JAXA)

The H-2B’s first and second stages worked as planned and 15 minutes after liftoff, the HTV cargo craft was released into its planned preliminary orbit, prompting an enthusiastic round of applause in the Japanese control center.

And unlike the Progress and the ATV, the Japanese ship is not designed to dock with the station on its own. Instead, the spacecraft autonomously maneuvers to a position just below the station and waits for the lab’s robot arm to grapple it and move it to a docking port.

“Those are very critical things for us to understand relative to understanding our environment and how we affect it and it’s good to be able to finally start having this kind of research on board ISS,” Suffredini said.

From there, it will continue the approach to a point about 100 feet below the station and pause once again before proceeding to the capture point just 29 feet from the laboratory complex.

(Credit:
Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now)

Japan's H-2B rocket blasts off on a space station resupply mission.