CIMON - short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion - is a spherical, free-flying robot built by Airbus on behalf of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), with its conversational AI powered by IBM Watson. About the size of a medicine ball and weighing roughly 5 kilograms, it flew to the International Space Station in 2018 and made its first interactive session with German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst on November 15, 2018, during the Horizons mission. Airbus described it as the first AI-based astronaut assistance system flown in space.
The idea was a hands-free helper. CIMON could float through the cabin, recognize a crew member’s face and voice, answer questions, display procedures on its screen, and act as a flying camera to document experiments, freeing astronauts from pausing to type on a laptop. The heavy speech-understanding work did not run on the robot itself; CIMON relayed audio to IBM Watson services on the ground and used its onboard system to navigate and interact.
CIMON was a technology demonstration rather than an operational tool, and its early sessions were sometimes awkward, but it previewed a plausible future in which crews talk to an onboard assistant. A successor, CIMON-2, with improved hardware and more robust software, followed to the station in late 2019.