First autonomous camera drone on the International Space Station

The first autonomous monitoring system to be deployed to the International Space Station (ISS) is the JEM Internal Ball Camera (or "Int-Ball" for short), which was developed by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and sent to the station as part of the CRS-11 resupply mission on 4 June 2017.

Astronauts on the ISS spend about 10% of their working hours monitoring experiments and activities on board the station. Int-Ball is designed to reduce their workload by autonomously monitoring experiments in the Kibo module, taking pictures or video at regular intervals.

Int-Ball steers itself using visual navigation markers on the walls of the module, and controllers on the ground can direct it to film different activities without bothering the crew. The core of the robot is a miniaturized attitude control module, which has contains reaction wheels and gyroscopes for all three axes of movement, as well as a computer to control it all.

JAXA's goals for the Int-Ball project are fairly modest (the robot cannot record sound or leave Kibo) but other more ambitious projects are in the pipeline, including the European Space Agency's CIMON robot assistant, which began on-station trials in November 2018, and NASA's modular Astrobee robot, which is due to arrive on the station in 2019.