NASA’s exploding RoboSimian shows how easily your Tesla Powerwall can turn into a bomb
No one is connecting the dots between IoT cyber risk and Li-Ion battery failure – and it’s time we started doing so


	Shocking footage of NASA explosion shows dangers of large Li-Ion powerpacks
	Internet of Things cyber risk poses threat to safety of products like Tesla Powerwall
	Focus of chip design set to shift from power and energy efficiency to security


Curation Comment:

The video footage of a large bionic monkey in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab shows very vividly that happens when you have not one Li-Ion battery to go wrong in isolation, as in a Samsung Note 7 phone, but one Li-Ion battery go wrong in the middle of 96 others. Like in… a Tesla Powerwall.


Rechargeable powerpacks are controlled by smart meters that can detect when the battery is full and switch the current off accordingly so that they do not overheat. Increasingly, such smart meters are connected to the Internet. Last week’s IoT-facilitated cyber attack has made the world far more aware of the vulnerabilities inherent in the vast majority of internet-enabled products currently being introduced to the market. So what happens when a similar attack hacks Powerwall smart meters and disables them, allowing all the Powerwalls in California to continue charging until they got hot enough to burn?


There’s a fair amount of boosterism in Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s recent claim that the internet of things will grow to 1 trillion devices – he was after all speaking at the event at which his company’s recent acquisition, ARM, launched two secure processor designs for IoT devices. But there’s no doubt that with chips reaching their capacity limits and Moore’s Law slowing in the face of the rather more fundmental laws of physics, we’re going to see a shift away from processors focussed on raw computational power and energy efficiency towards ones more focussed on security.
 

On June 14, 2016, four researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were preparing to ship a waist-high, ape-like robot named RoboSimian off-site. They had built the bot to rescue people from dangerous situations that human rescuers can’t hack. The scientists swapped one lithium-ion battery for a fresh one, then left for lunch to let the new power supply charge.

Left alone in the lab, RoboSimian’s battery did what such batteries famously do: went boom. Plumes of smoke vented from the robot’s exposed torso, followed by a burst of flame. Fire filled the room, then stabilized at the size of a toxic campfire. Gather round the burning bionic monkey, everybody. (Don’t.)

Exploding lithium-ion batteries are not new news. Last year’s hottest Christmas present, the hoverboard, was a bit too hot. You can’t take an e-cigarette on a plane because it might combust in the cargo hold. And if you have a Samsung Galaxy Note 7…well…better luck in your next phone pick.

But the magnitude of RoboSimian itself---and that of other lithium-powered NASA projects---set its battery fire apart. “In general, a single lithium ion cell is dangerous, but it can’t cause a gigantic explosion,” says Jay Whitacre, a Carnegie Mellon professor of materials science and engineering who used to do battery science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Cell phones typically have a single cell; RoboSimian had 96. If you’ve seen what a Samsung device can do to your hand, imagine what this robot could have done to the rest of you.

And because NASA builds lithium-loaded vehicles that also go to space---sometimes, someday taking people up there---this fire may feel like cause for concern. The huge sets of cells that live inside robots, spacecraft, and robotic spacecraft? “That’s a lot of energy that’s released very quickly, and it can be fatal,” says Whitacre. “The more you put in one place, the more you have to look at it.”

Pay your interns

According to a presentation that Lynne Lee, the laboratory’s mishap program manager, made earlier this month to senior management, RoboSimian’s boom packed the power of a stick of dynamite. “If you notice where that fire came out, it was exactly where our researchers were standing,” Lee said, as she prepared to share lessons learned as the October Safety Message. “It could have been a very bad day.”

After the initial battery burst, an intern from the next lab over climbed through a window and sprayed RoboSimian with a CO2 fire extinguisher. But the fire persisted---he needed water to quench this combustion, despite NASA’s safety protocol, which called for a Class D extinguisher (no such extinguisher was around, anyway).

Another intern called the fire department. Firefighters, with the benefit of breathing masks, eventually rolled RoboSimian outside by a handle, like some kind of Mad Max Radio Flyer, and killed the fire with water.

So what actually happened here? The final report on why the fire erupted in the first place isn’t ready, says Brett Kennedy, head of the RoboSimian project. But they do have some details about The Incident.