Research Associate At The Nasa Flight Robotics Laboratory
Washington, Dc, Us
The NASA Flight Robotics Laboratory at MSFC has many robotic systems to simulate and develop new technology for avionics and dynamic control of rockets and spacecrafts. Such systems include, two air-bearing vehicles configured for automated docking and rocket avionic motion simulation, a Dynamic Overhead Target Simulator (6-degrees of freedom robotic arm), a Dynamic Solar Simulator, a tilt table, and many more. The team’s main objective for the 2011 Summer Internship was to improve the performance of the automated air-bearing vehicle designed to aid in research of space vehicles docking operations. Such performance improvements include, upgrades to more robust control algorithms, data logging, and the addition of a remote controller for robotic tele-operation and tele-presence investigations.Additional tasks to improve the performance of the air-bearing vehicle include, floor characterization by laser-tracker measurements, analyzing the data in CAD software, providing the robot controller with the floor characterization data, and the addition of bump avoidance algorithms depending on the characterization of the bumps and the robot's capabilities.As secondary projects, depending on time and laboratory requirements, improvements were made to the control software of the 6-degrees of freedom robotic arm. These improvements consisted of implementing a new networking configuration, the development of more robust control software, and the addition of the solar simulator and tilt table controlled by a single computer.