This month in New Scientist Space there is a great article on a new flying eye droid, which will orbit a space station or craft searching and cataloging damage reports. Personally I think it resembles a probe droid from Star Wars -and that's OK, I love that stuff-.

The Miniature Autonomous Extravehicular Robotic Camera has now completed a docking test at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and could be ready for its first space mission as early as 2006 or 2007. If it is flown on space shuttle missions, Mini AERCam could hover under the orbiter’s belly to check for damage to the heat shield.

But it will not fly on the next shuttle mission. Instead, astronauts aboard Discovery will use an extension of the shuttle’s robotic arm to peer underneath the orbiter. Astronauts say that the manoeuvre is awkward and there is very little clearance between the robot arm and the shuttle’s wings - using Mini AERCam in the future would avoid those problems.

~'Flying eyeball' to inspect spacecraft
New Scientist