Now that both Jonson Station and Jonson Outpost had become fully operational, it soon became apparent that JE needed more crew members to keep things running. Some critical operations required manning around the clock, so regular staff could be reassigned to cover personnel gaps, but only temporarily, since crew rotation proved essential, at least for humans.
The obvious alternative, robots, offered both pros and cons. Fully autonomous robots, such as the gynoid Serena, could perform most of the functions traditionally assigned to humans, since their positronic brains could mimic the complexities of human judgment fairly closely. This solution worked very well for many station operations which did not involve harming humans, but military use of these advanced robots was prohibited by Sarah's policy of programming fully autonomous robots to follow Asimov's Robot Laws.
Alas, many new defense roles emerged, especially at the outpost with the military robotics lab, the situation room, and of course lethal weapons. JE staff spent many hours discussing various scenarios, and finally settled on a hybrid approach. At least one human must always be present during military operations, but semi-autonomous robots could be employed as long as they were strictly limited to only taking harmful actions when specifically ordered by humans. These less sophisticated robots worked only under detailed and thorough direction, and lacked the complex judgment capabilities of humans (or the fully autonomous robots).
Serena had already become the prototype for a line of fully autonomous robots qualified to perform non-military operations around the station, but for potentially lethal defense operations at the outpost, Sarah would need to develop a line of semi-autonomous robots to fill out the crews. Fortunately, these less complex robots could be designed and assembled more quickly, and did not require the challenging logistics of obtaining and integrating more positronic brain components from Earth.
Sarah developed a prototype semi-autonomous robot, which she named Xander, and the new robot soon undertook trial operations in the outpost situation room. These proved quite successful, so Sarah and her assistants soon began churning out additional semi-autonomous robots.
(By the way, readers may notice android and gynoid robots in blog story illustrations, for both autonomous and semi-autonomous humanoid robot lines. They were gendered to reflect the mixed gender human crew, to make interaction easier and seem more natural. However, non-humanoid robots usually do not display gender-related characteristics.)