Icarus Robotics Flies ISS-Bound Joy Robot in Microgravity for the First Time

Icarus Robotics said yesterday that it tested Joy, its free-flying robot, across four parabolic flights held from Sept. 9 to 11.

Joy completed 66 parabolas in total across those flights, accumulating about two minutes of weightlessness.

Joy is a free-flying robot equipped with robotic arms and finger pinch grippers.

Icarus designed the system to move through the pressurized interior of the International Space Station (ISS), where it would take on the cargo and logistics work that consumes much of astronauts' time.

The company said Joy will launch to the ISS in 2027 as Joyride-1, under a mission management agreement with Voyager Technologies announced in March. The parabolic flights were the last major test before Icarus finalizes Joy's flight hardware for handover to NASA in January.

"It's a very surreal thing to be building toward that, and we have been talking about it for over a year," Ethan Barajas, co-founder and CEO of Icarus Robotics, told The Robot Report. He said the team now has "the confidence to go into January and say that this robot that we will hand over to NASA will operate in the way that we want in microgravity on the ISS."

Barajas added that the team set stretch goals alongside minimum viable success criteria, and that "throughout this entire week, we hit all of those."

Icarus Robotics says its goal is to free up astronauts so they can focus on higher-value research and mission objectives.

The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup raised $6.1 million in seed funding last year, and has since worked to turn its system into a scalable, production-ready robot.

Icarus Robotics focused its campaign on three core systems inside Joy: manipulation, state estimation, and flight control.

Parabolic flight is the only way to produce real microgravity without going to orbit. During these flights, the aircraft arcs over the top of a steep climb, giving everything inside roughly 20 seconds of weightlessness per parabola.

"We had essentially four flights across the week, and then we chose to isolate different systems across the different flights," said Jamie Palmer, co-founder and chief technology officer of Icarus. "About half of our campaign was based around essentially testing the manipulation system."

"The arms themselves we were the most happy with," he added. "It was one of the biggest unknowns and one of the hardest things to model in the simulator."