The mechanical arm is part of China's continuous research effort on robotics that has spanned more than a decade.

China Space News originally reported the development of the space robot on March 1. Beijing Youth Daily and the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po provided updates to the work last week.

The National Aerospace High Technology Space Robotics Engineering Research Centre leads the effort to develop the robot arm. The research centre is part of the No. 502 Research Institute, also called the Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, of the Chinese Academy of Space Technology (CAST).

The robotic system has two "limbs" connected by a joint in the middle.

At the end of each "limb" is another joint, which connects a smaller mechanical section that acts like the "hand" of the robot arm.

There are a total of nine joints and 14 pairs of sensors on the robot arm, which has a formal name of "EMR" and a nickname "Mr. E" ("E mister" when spoken in Chinese).

Liang Bin, Deputy Director of the research centre, told Beijing Youth Daily that "Mr. E" had different grapple devices at each end of the arm.

These grapple devices were equipped with various sensors and would behave like "digits" of a hand, which could perform precision operation.

Researcher Chen Jianxin explained further that "Mr. E" could walk to different locations on a space station, or anchor itself to a specific location and perform various tasks with the other end of the arm.

The arm, under preprogrammed commands and commands issued from the space station, can crawl in either an inchworm or a swaying motion.

The robot can be used to inspect, transport and exchange components of the space station, catch free-floating objects and help service orbiting satellites. It can also perform delicate operations such as screwing a bolt and unplugging a device from a socket.

In addition to working outside a space station, "Mr. E" could also work inside the station to tend science experiments.

Engineers at the space robotics research centre said that given some modifications, the arm could travel with planetary spacecraft to explore the Moon and Mars.

According to a reporter from China Space News who saw "Mr. E" at the research centre earlier this year, the robot arm was one-fifth the size of the flight version. However, none of the three media reports contain any information on the actual dimensions or other parameters of "Mr. E".

The appearance and description of the Chinese robot arm bear some similarities to the existing robot arm on ISS, the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS). Dubbed Canadarm2, SSRMS is a major contribution from the Canadian Space Agency to the ISS project.

More Than A Decade Of R&D
China began research and development on robotics in 1986 under the program "Project 863 Intelligent Robots".

The first space robot, a fixed base robotic system, came into existence in the early 1990s during the 7th five-year economic plan, or "7 5" in abbreviation.

The latest system "Mr. E" belongs to the third generation of Chinese space robots.

To check the operation of "Mr. E", the arm goes through weightlessness simulation tests with a wire suspension system at the space robotics research centre.

Engineers explained that although the method of underwater weightlessness simulation would be as effective, the cost of maintaining a purified water system was expensive. Thus the centre had chosen the wire suspension approach, which would give at least a 95 percent compensation in the gravitational pull.

The centre claims that their wire suspension weightlessness simulation system is the largest one in the world.

As "Mr. E" began to mature at the research centre, a separate but parallel effort to build a robot "hand" was underway at the Harbin Institute of Technology (H.I.T.) in the Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China.

Wen Wei Po reported last Monday (Nov. 25) that H.I.T. had successfully built the first Chinese robot "hand". Its agility could replace some of the complex tasks that yuhangyuans ("astronauts") face working in space.

But the newspaper questioned whether the H.I.T. robot hand could be easily integrated with "Mr. E", as the robotic arm and hand came from two different research units.

Job Search To Work On ISS
Chinese space officials realize that the robotic system would complement the work of yuhangyuans.

As China has set its sight on building its own space laboratory, then a permanent human-tended space station, research and development of space robotics remains an important area in the high technology advancement of the nation.

Space officials feel that the technology of "Mr. E" is sufficiently advanced to be useful in the construction of ISS.

As such Chinese officials have been pursuing to secure a place for "Mr. E" on ISS through different channels. There has been no response though from the ISS project consortium.

But space officials believe that the competitive functionality and pricing would one day make "Mr. E" the darling of the international space community.

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