Products of Tomorrow

The technologies NASA develops don’t just blast off into space. They also improve our lives here on Earth. Life-saving search-and-rescue tools, implantable medical devices, advances in commercial aircraft safety,...

Machinery & Equipment Category Winner

Hybrid Rotor Compressor for Natural Gas Extraction Jeremy Pitts and Pedro Santos, OsComp Systems, Boston, MA

Natural gas is a booming industry in the U.S. and represents a bridge energy solution to...

A Sub-Hertz, Low-Frequency Vibration Isolation Platform

One of the major technical problems deep-space optical communication (DSOC) systems need to solve is the isolation of the optical terminal from vibrations produced by the spacecraft...

Steerable Hopping Six-Legged Robot

The figure depicts selected aspects of a six-legged robot that moves by hopping and that can be steered in the sense that it can be launched into a hop in a controllable direction. This is a prototype of...

More About Reconfigurable Exploratory Robotic Vehicles

Modular exploratory robotic vehicles that will be able to reconfigure themselves in the field are undergoing development. These vehicles at the initial concept stage were described in...

Reconfigurable Exploratory Robotic Vehicles

A family of rugged, modular, reconfigurable, instrumented robotic vehicles has been proposed for use in exploration of the surfaces of Mars and other remote planets. These or similar vehicles could...

Snakelike Robots Would Maneuver in Tight Spaces

Robots with multiple-link arms that could reach through narrow openings into hidden cavities are undergoing development. Called "multifunction dexterous boro-robots" (MDBRs), these robots...