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NASA's Astrobee Robot Will Soon Buzz Around the International Space Station

NASA's Astrobee - a robotic cube filled with sensors, cameras, computers, and a propulsion system - is designed to fly freely on board the International Space Station, helping astronauts with a variety of tasks. NASA expects to have Astrobee on orbit at some point between July 2017 and June 2018, and will be sending three of them to the ISS. For testing on the ground, Astrobee is mounted on top of a sled that uses carbon dioxide to create an air bearing above a flat block of granite. This allows engineers to simulate microgravity in two dimensions to test the robot's propulsion and navigation systems.

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Aerospace Automation Data Acquisition Data Acquisition Motion Control Robotics Sensors Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 this is the NASA as Research Center intelligent robotics group we're going to be talking about the astrab project today my name is Trey Smith and I'm the lead systems engineer for the project this is a prototype 4 of the astrab in many ways it's not exactly flight-like uh but it's pretty close in terms of things like size and the layout of the different components of the robot the

    00:00:19 astb project has three main use cases the first use case is it'll be a replacement for the spar's research facility which currently is on Orbit on the ISS and it's used for all kinds of uh guest science the Second Use case is we want to be able to take video of crew activities the state-of-the-art for taking video of crew on the ISS is the crew themselves will set up uh

    00:00:40 camcorders uh we prefer it if the flight controllers can uh basically uh move their own camera around and spare the crew that effort the third use case is for sensor surveys any kind of payload that that you can put on the Astra B if it's a sensor now you can do a survey of the entire ISS so the first thing you'll notice is the robot has a central module surrounded by two propulsion modules so

    00:01:03 the two propulsion modules provide six degree of Freedom homic control for the robot each of them contains a central impeller so that's a centrifugal fan it draws air in this way it pressurizes the plenum inside and then the nozzles allow a different amount of uh air out of each nozzle to control the thrust level this is the nav cam we use this for general purpose navigation so the robot will re

    00:01:30 recognize the pre-existing features landmarks on the inside of the ISS you can see in our lab environment here we actually have posters that are basically blown up photographs of the ISS walls to give us some realistic visual texture to work with here we're looking at the a side of the astb robot first thing to notice is we have these cups here that match two lances that are on the docking

    00:01:52 station so as the as moves in close to the docking station that those features will help it align properly so the perching arm is designed to grasp onto ISS handrails so you can see how the the fingers of the arm open once it grabs onto a hand rail it uses its two degrees of freedom to provide a pan tilt motion for the camera the SC Cam that we talked about on the front side of the robot

    00:02:14 originally astb was a three-year project we recently got an extension that covers 2018 and we'll be using that period to do on orbit commissioning our goal is to get the hardware on dock ready to launch from Kennedy Space Center uh by the end of fysical 2017