Automaton

Photo: David Clugston for IEEE Spectrum

Last year, Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen of the University of Washington’s BioRobotics Lab wrote an article for Spectrum about their surgical robot, Raven, and a field test in the California rangelands, where a surgeon commanded the robot remotely.

Early this year, Raven headed out to another extreme environment: the Aquarius underwater habitat off Key Largo, Florida. In the experiment, part of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project, surgeons teleoperated the two-armed robot all the way from Seattle.

Automaton spoke with Hannaford to get the details.

NASA today announced the recipients of their SBIR ("Small Business Innovation Research") grants, among which were quite a few robotics projects. Lots of them have to do with power sources or sensors, but one I found particularly interesting is the DC brushless motor that can withstand the harsh atmosphere of Venus. From the proposal:

Honeybee Robotics proposes development of high temperature scoop and joint; and continued development of an extreme temperature brushless DC motor and a resolver. All hardware will be demonstrated in simulated Venus surface conditions. During Phase I, a first-generation prototype BLDC motor and resolver were designed, built and tested in Venus-like conditions (460oC temperature, mostly CO2 gas environment). The Phase I tests demonstrated the feasibility of the design through verification that the motor and the resolver can operate at 460oC for an extended period of time. A further developed and optimized version of this motor and resolver could be used to actuate sample acquisition systems, robotic arms, and other devices outside of an environment-controlled landed platform on the surface of Venus.

460 deg C? For the non-metric among us, that's 860 deg F. Wow.

The rest of the robotics-related SBIR grants can be found here and here.

For the college-aged (and graduate-student-aged) among you, I wanted to point out that the NASA Robotics Academy is accepting applications for its 2008 summer program. Students are hired to work on projects in teams of 4-5 at either Goddard or Marshall Space Flight Center. The internship is residential (you'll live with other interns) and it does include a stipend.

I'm an alum of the 2005 program (its inaugural year) when I worked on a planetary rover design project with Goddard in conjunction with a lab at the University of Maryland; it was a good time and the trips to see other robotics labs -- we went to Johnson Space Center, MIT's CSAIL, and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute -- was unbeatable.

Also, you get a discount at the NASA gift shops. Just saying.

Application deadline is 15 January, and you'll need some recommendations, so get crackin'!

This New York Times article describes how Mars Rover Spirit's wheel, which hasn't worked since March 2006, ended up scraping Martian dust off a patch of silica -- and when silica is found naturally on Earth, it is in one of two environments that "teem with microbial life." Scientists are still investigating the silica patch it found to see what we can learn from it.

Also of note, this January will mark the rovers' fourth birthday on Mars, well in excess of their original 90 day mission.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons