Honeybee Robotics, Inc.

Honeybee Robotics designs, develops, and supplies automated mechanisms for industrial, defense, and aerospace applications. Their products include solar array drives and deployment devices, automated drills and sampling systems, spacecraft mechanisms, and custom electromechanical subsystems for spaceflight. They completed over 90 projects for NASA, plus numerous others for clients as diverse as the Department of Defense and Con Edison.

Transcript

00:00:01 once upon a time two music majors in new york city decided to build robots and they started a small company called honeybee robotics their first projects were huge mechanical signs but honeybee discovered that their robotic technologies belonged in another kind of space and nasa was a natural home for them

00:00:24 early on they worked with structures experts at langley research center to build end effectors for robotic assembly of large structures in space with funding from nasa's jet propulsion laboratory or jpl through the small business innovation research or sbir program the company began developing a drilling and sampling system for use in space

00:00:46 honeybee had to start from scratch when they drill on earth they use cutting fluids and they use they use a slurry that kind of continuously flushes the cuttings from borehole and when we drill on mars or when we drill on a comet or when we drill on the moon you don't have that so all the drilling has to be done dry

00:01:06 nasa sbir contracts help the company mature the technology and build relationships with the scientists who would one day rely on it for a mission to mars that legacy knowledge was essential for success as the original sbir technology evolved from a corer into a grinder based on a simple sketch working closely with researchers at jpl honeybee developed what is now known as

00:01:31 the rock abrasion tool or rat the tool uses a gentle abrasion to expose the martian rock for analysis by other instruments since 2004 the rat has been operating successfully on the martian rovers spirit and opportunity we were able to take it from that sketch which is basically trl2 to trl-9 straight through to something that works the first time and every time

00:01:56 since on the surface of mars once they saw the images from the rovers honeybee engineers knew they'd done it right and getting their technology flight qualified has been important for the firm it says so much about the qualification of the company and the processes that you've been you've learned

00:02:14 to put in place today honeybee is working with nasa on technologies for upcoming missions with another contract from ames they're making their technologies smarter by embedding them with sensors to provide information about drilling conditions and processes for the mars phoenix mission they're improving the existing design of the

00:02:34 landers scoop to enable the drill to collect samples from the surface for the mars science laboratory the firm is building a sophisticated sample manipulation system that will enable a rover to do land studies by collecting baking and snipping the samples through sbir funds from the jet propulsion laboratory honeybee is developing a high temperature motor for

00:02:57 a drilling and sampling system to be used on venus and honeybee is also working on two other sbir contracts for technologies with lunar applications and their previous research will be important we did so much work in defining what a flight drill needs to be which means boiling down everything to its essence getting rid of all the fancy little features that you

00:03:19 don't really need and all that is going to transfer right over to a lunar drill