| Robotic Arm Research Falls into Students’ Hands |
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| Dr. Michelle Moore, Assistant Professor
of Computer Science, and a team of alumni and student researchers
have had their hands in some tricky business lately. After producing
promising results for NASA from grant-funded research that began
in March 2002, the team was asked to apply what they had learned
about improving NASA’s scheduling systems to another important
area – robotic arm trajectories. Using development software furnished by NASA scientists, Moore and her team began their work on the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM) portion of the robotic arm. The goal of the research is to automate the operation process so it is possible for a single astronaut to operate the shuttle robotic arm rather than the two astronauts it currently requires. The project is a part of the International Space Station partnership, which includes the U.S., Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil and a consortium of European communities. “The SPDM is the ‘hand’ portion that is being developed to eventually attach to two large arms, one on the shuttle and a larger one on the International Space Station,” Moore said. |
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The essence of the work done by the team involves deriving appropriate mathematical equations to feed into a system which then distributes mathematical computations to networked computers. According to Moore, this process significantly reduces the time it takes for a single computer system to compute an application. “The students have helped in all phases of the
research, including testing, and are still exploring specialized refinements
of their own,” Moore said. |
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The Island University