[Three NASA interns are sitting in an office at the NASA Ames Research Centre, having a conversation. The interns are, from left to right: Andrew, Hammond and Rose.]
Andrew: Hi, I'm Andrew
Hammond: I'm Hammond
Rose: and I’m Rose.
Andrew: We're three of the Kiwi interns that have been sent here to the NASA Ames Research Centre as part of the International Internship Programme. In today's video we're going to talk a little bit about the projects that we're working on, and some of the first impressions that we've been having since arriving here at NASA Ames about three weeks ago.
Rose says, “Something I'm doing may end up on another planet someday, which is awesome. So what I'm doing at the moment is optimising various quantitative techniques of stripping voltammetry, which is when you load a whole load of metal onto an electrode and strip it all off the electrode very quickly and look at what the current does. There's some indication from hydrothermal vent chemistry and various other areas of the solar system suggesting that some trace metals may be indicators that there is life, or the potential for life. Things like iron are really important in the sort of chemical energy cycle of methanogenic organisms that show up on the black smokers at the bottom of the sea, so it's a lot of ‘look at things that happen in weird places on earth and see if we can find the potential to replicate their environment elsewhere’. And so I'm spending a lot of time dunking electrodes in and out of beakers and watching them to see what they do".
[Clip of Rose using the lab equipment to load and strip electrodes, which then cuts to an image of the results being graphed on a computer screen.]
Andrew says, “I'm working under the supervision of doctor Kelly Kasumi and I'm working on the sensor placement for a novel flexible wing design for aircraft. So essentially I'm looking at how you can place the sensors on there to figure out how the wing is moving. So as aircraft are becoming lighter - they've been designed lighter to decrease fuel consumption – then the wings are becoming a lot more elastic - so this can be quite detrimental if you can't control for it. And so, yeah, I'm looking at the sensor placement to estimate how their wings are moving. I'll probably move on to looking at some of their controls - so how you can control the wing in order to do what we want to do. Hammond asks Andrew “Is it going to be practical for commercial airlines do you think, or is this mostly fighter jets we’re talking about here?”.
Andrew replies, “I think it largely will be commercial airlines. I mean it's currently just a novel wing design and research for that, but I think I see it being used for commercial aircraft”.
Andrew asks Hammond, “So, what about you, what's your project?”. Hammond replies “So my project is under the supervision of Dr. Michael Furlong and it's in the area of what they call tensegrity robotics. So they have what's called a tensegrity robot, and what that is, is a robot that looks very strange. They're designed to mimic the way that biological organisms move around. So, like I move around - I've got bones and I've got muscles connected to bones- I don't have motors that spin. The way a tensegrity robots works is they try to emulate that with spine joints, so they’re fixed joints, just like our bones are fixed, and then they're connected together by strings which are actuated or springs which are actuated. And using that - just like how my muscles can move my arm up and down - the tightening and loosening of these string muscles within the robot can move that robot around. So they've got a number of tensegrity robots they've built here as prototypes - there's some that look like snakes and some that look very strange all together.
[Image of a tensegrity model that looks like a snake.]
But the design that they're really focused on now is called Super Ball, which has got six bones and it is a ball structure that rolls around.
[An image of a second prototype called the SuperBall comes up , which looks like 6 rods joined by strings organised in a round shape, then an animation of the Super Ball being moved by code on a computer screen. The image goes back to the three students sitting in the office again.]
My part within that project is looking at how we can get the ‘muscles’ if you were, of the robot to achieve certain gaits. So when I want to walk as a person I can just think about walking over there and kind of my body does it semi-automatically. They want that sort of behaviour on the robot as well, where the control unit for the robot can say ‘hey robot, go over there’ and the robots muscles already have this idea of the pattern they're going to need to execute in order to move the robot from where it is at Point A to where it wants to be at point B".
Rose comments: “So basically it’s a marionette that rolls along the ground”.
Hammond replies, “That’s a good way of looking at it. It IS like a marionette running along the ground.
So they want to put these robots maybe on Mars, maybe on the moon - basically anywhere where there's harsh environments with the idea being that they can navigate unexpected terrains they're not going to be stopped by a little ledge. And also they can be a bit more resilient when it comes to the damage and wear and tear that these designs can take".
Andrew: “I think first impressions here are really good. I mean, California is an amazing place to live, and I don't think it's rained a day since we've been here, so that's been pretty awesome. Otherwise, I think I was initially struck by (as we talked about) how old it seems, but following that, incredibly impressed about the nature of the research that they do, and as you’re kind of saying how cutting-edge the research is. And kind of how new it is, so although externally it might not look that fancy inside they've got a lot of amazing projects going on.
So we visited the vertical motion simulator which is like incredibly large, I think it's the largest vertical motion simulator because you can move up and down ten storeys, and so they were initially testing the space shuttle landing there. They were training astronauts to land the Space Shuttle on there, and now they're kind of using it for air taxis, so the likes of Uber who developing air taxi systems. So it's just interesting to see how a lot of the hardware that they've got in their facilities is being applied for these newer kind of applications.
So to conclude, we're all making really good progress on our projects so far, and I think we're all really enjoying everything - so we'll check back in and a couple weeks and keep you updated. Thanks for listening guys"