News Summary

• Icarus Robotics has raised a $6.1 million seed round.
• The startup wants to use robots to take over tasks on the International Space Station.
• The first robot will be a fan-propelled robot with two robot arms outfitted with jaw grippers.
• The team recently performed a terrestrial long-distance teleoperation demo with a bimanual jaw gripper system, unzipping a real ISS cargo bag, unpacking it, and zipping it back up again.
• The plan is to spend a year de-risking the full suite of cargo bag operations, then step into finer-grained tasks related to station maintenance, like filter and seal inspections.