Icarus is building robots that could take over menial tasks in a spacecraft, allowing astronauts to focus on research instead. Irish co-founded and New-York-headquartered start-up Icarus has raised $6.1m in a seed round to build a robot labour force for space. The round was led by Soma Capital and Xtal, with participation from Nebular and Massive Tech Ventures, among others. To solve this problem, the founders want to create intelligent robots that take over the time-consuming and menial tasks. The start-up isn’t aiming for a humanoid model, rather, a fan-propelled robot with arms fitted with grippers.