Russia on August 22 launched an unmanned rocket carrying a life-size humanoid robot that will spend 10 days learning to assist astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).

Named Fedor, for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research with identification number Skybot F850, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia.

Fedor blasted off in a Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz is set to dock with the space station on August 24 and stay till September 7.

Soyuz ships are normally manned on such trips, but this time no humans are travelling in order to test a new emergency rescue system.

Instead of cosmonauts, Fedor was strapped into a specially adapted pilot’s seat, with a small Russian flag in his hand.

The silvery anthropomorphic robot stands 1.8 m tall and weighs 160 kg.

Fedor has Instagram and Twitter accounts that describe it as learning new skills such as opening a bottle of water. In the station, it will trial those manual skills in very low gravity.

“That’s connecting and disconnecting electric cables, using standard items from a screwdriver and a spanner to a fire extinguisher,” said Alexander Bloshenko, the Russian space agency’s director for prospective programmes and science.

“The first stage of in-flight experiments went according to the flight plan,” the robot’s account tweeted after reaching orbit.

Fedor copies human movements, a key skill that allows it to remotely help astronauts or even people on Earth carry out tasks while they are strapped into an exoskeleton.

Such robots will eventually carry out dangerous operations such as space walks, Bloshenko said.

Fedor is described as potentially useful on Earth for working in high radiation environments, de-mining and tricky rescue missions.

On board, the robot will perform tasks supervised by Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, who joined the ISS last month, and will wear an exoskeleton in a series of experiments scheduled for later this month.

Space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin showed pictures of the robot to President Vladimir Putin this month, saying it will be “an assistant to the crew”.

“In the future, we plan that this machine will also help us conquer deep space,” he added.

Fedor is not the first robot to go into space.

In 2011, NASA sent up Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot developed with General Motors and a similar aim of working in high-risk environments.

It was flown back to Earth in 2018 after experiencing technical problems.

In 2013, Japan sent up a small robot called Kirobo along with the ISS’s first Japanese space commander. Developed with Toyota, it was able to hold conversations - albeit only in Japanese.