SUBJECT: SPACE STATION ROBOTICS FILE: UFO2160
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NASA SPACE NEWS
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Release No. 90-035
NASA, UNIVERSITIES CONSORTIUM TO STUDY SPACE STATION ROBOTICS
A laboratory as big as Texas employing the state's brightest students
will soon be put to work with NASA to aide in developing robotics for Space
Station Freedom.
The NASA/JSC Universities Space Automation and Robotics Consortium will
link robotics laboratories at Rice University, the University of Texas at
Arlington and Texas A&M University with JSC labs to study the Robotics tasks
planned for Space Station Freedom. The labs will be interconnected by a
computer network to allow the universities to remotely control each other's
robots as well as those at JSC. Experiments can then be carried out in
what will essentially be a statewide lab. The project, proposed to NASA by
the four schools, will be funded by a $240,000.00 grant to begin before
October.
The Consortium was formed by the schools in 1989, all of which,
excluding UTA, have been participants in past NASA robotics research.
"With the interconnected labs and the consortium, we'll be able to
take advantage of all the different areas of expertise exhibited by the
schools," Carl Adams, NASA project engineer, said. The schools' areas of
expertise include the machine vision and mobile robotics at Rice; manual
controllers and modular robot architectures at UT; system architectures
and artificial intelligence at A&M; and human performance and workloads at
UTA.
"People today use computer networks to exchange data, but we'll be
using this network to control robots at the four universities and the JSC
labs from remote facilities," said Prof. Rui de Figueiredo, Rice reseacher
and consortium chairman. "The universities got together and approached NASA
with the idea to better coordinate our efforts and areas of specialty. It's
a logical arrangement." The four universities jointly presented the
proposed consortium to NASA, where Charles R. Price, chief of the Robotic
Systems Developement Branch at JSC, suggested a computer link among the
labs to study simultaneous control of multiple robots.
The universities' areas of expertise are complementary, and, in
addition to space station maintenance studies, an evaluation of future
robotics applications in space will be conducted by the consortium. The
connected labs will allow NASA a flexibility to use research conducted by the
schools in a way that has not been possible before.
"We can be of great bennefit to the Space Station Freedom Program."
de Figueiredo said. "And the importance of the work, along with it's posture
on the cutting edge of robotics, will provide a strong motivation and a sense
of real accomplishment for our students."
"We're trying to creat one large lab," Adams added. "It's good for the
schools, and the students get to work on something that has a direct
application, and it's good for us --NASA gets the benefits of their work."
De Figueiredo chairs the consortium and it's project's principla
investigator at Rice; Prof. Delbert Tesar is UT's principal investigator;
Prof. George Kondraske is UTA's principal investigator; and Prof. Volz is
A&M's principal investigator.
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