This week's Question: Former astronaut and current Dartmouth University physician Jay Buckey and his team have sent Oculus Rift headsets to Canadian Force Station Alert, a military station in Canada located 500 miles from the North Pole. The researchers will ultimately test whether exposure to nature through...

A sensor element that consists of a thermally resistive layer made of nand p-type semiconductor elements amplifies the temperature gradient in the resistive layer that results from heat flow through the sensor. The thermoelectric array provides greater accuracy and sensitivity over a traditional thermopile arrangement for...

A Web interface framework has been developed that implements the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Planning Service (SPS) specification. The OGC defines the SPS to “provide information concerning content and encoding of the parameter data that has to be provided in order to...

Traditionally, sensor systems are considered independent systems that are separately designed, manufactured, and integrated into a target system such as an aircraft. In most cases, this is a complex and costly process including sensor design, installation, wiring, testing, and maintenance. The sensor...

One way of imaging exoplanets around nearby stars is to use a starshade in conjunction with a space telescope. Typically, the starshade, which resembles a sunflower in outline, is ~ 30 meters in diameter. The starshade is flown about 50,000 km in front of the telescope, and when positioned...

Remote sensing — the use of spacebased satellite technologies to obtain information on environmental variables — in combination with other types of data, can provide information on changes in the Earth’s surface and atmosphere that are critical for weather forecasting and responding to human...

Partial bitstream relocation (PBR) on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is a technique to re-scale parallelism of accelerator architectures at run time and enhance fault tolerance. PBR techniques have focused on reading inactive bitstreams stored in memory, on-chip or off-chip, whose...

A scanning LiDAR, by its inherent nature, generates a great deal of raw digital data. To generate 3D imagery in real time, the data must be processed as quickly as possible. One method of discerning time-of-flight of a laser pulse for a LiDAR application is correlating a Gaussian pulse with a...

As electronic circuits approach submillimeter wavelength frequencies (300 GHz) and higher, the traditional low-loss method of packaging electronic circuits in waveguide modules for guiding the signal requires more attention. The reasons are that circuits at higher frequencies have lower signal...

JPL has been hand-welding aluminum tubing for decades in support of flight programs and ground support equipment, including thermal plates and shrouds. This hand-welding process is time-consuming, cumbersome, difficult, and unreliable in terms of repeatability and success, which leads to leaks, rework,...

A method, using a particle filter, has been created for identifying the location, orientation, and shape of an object that a robot hand touches. An appropriate motion model has been defined that characterizes the motion of the robot hand as it moves relative to an object....

The Robonaut 2 (R2) Dexterous Robot is the result of an effort to build a two-armed, ten-fingered humanoid robot torso capable of assembly work. This invention concerns a multi-fingered hand, and is composed of several parts. One is a tendon-driven, four-link, four-degree-of-freedom robotic...

Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are lightweight, highly dynamic vehicles with limited payload, sensing, and computation capabilities. There is significant interest to automate MAVs for military surveillance, reconnaissance, and search-and-rescue missions. The current...

Various advancements have been made in the development of miniature in vivo surgical robots. These robots are designed to perform Laparoendo scopic Single-Site Surgery (LESS). After being inserted through a single incision, these robots can perform surgical procedures in a dexterous workspace....