NASA Ames
Tech Space Pavilion
&
Computer Museum
Earliest and Latest
Modern Robots
NASA Mars Robots
JPL Ancestor Rover
Ames Rover K-9
Ultimate Wireless Mobile Computing
by SFRSA Mediameister
Cliff Thompson
July 27-28,
NASA Ames Research Center
Hangar 1
California Air and Space Museum
Moffett Field, CA
A recent NASA Ames News Release announced an exciting robotics event:
After checking in with
NASA Ames Learning Technologies Project (LTC) Manager Mark Leon and
Robotics Education Project (REP) Coordinator Joe Hering, regarding access
to the event, I also called the NASA Ames Computer
History Museum to book a tour, then drove down to NASA Ames the day
before the event to pick up my "press pass" and check out the
Museum. I'd heard that the Museum had recently merged with the Boston
Computer Museum, whose collection included the very first modern mobile
robots developed at Stanford and JPL in the late '60's (I'd seen them
there some years ago, during a break from the Robot Store's ROBOEXPO
Boston event, where I was demonstrating LEGO MindStorms robotics kits).
Later, a few days before the Tech Space Pavilion event, I was a volunteer
at the grand opening of the DigiBarn
Computer Museum in Santa Cruz, where I learned from some guest NASA
Ames Computer Museum docents, who were there giving tours of the
DigiBarn's Cray 1 exhibit, that the early robots from the Boston Museum
were now at the NASA Ames Museum.
A visit to the NASA Ames
Computer Museum reveals an impressively vast and comprehensive collection
of the evolutionary beginnings of our modern technology. Wandering about
in search of the ancestral robots, I spotted them across the room.
There is the machine that perhaps started it all, the robot named "Shakey"
from Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
in the late '60's (both MIT AI Lab Head Rodney
Brooks and Carnegie Mellon Mobile Robot Lab Head Hans
Moravec received their early robotics training at Stanford). Below
Shakey's diagram
is a sign that reads:
"The 'shaky' robot
from SRI was the first mobile robot to apply reason to its activities.
Using information from its environment gained from a TV camera, range
finder and bump sensors, it could plan and follow a route. Shaky
would radio information to room-sized DEC PDP-10 & DEC PDP-15
computers which, in turn, sent back commands to make the robot move".
Next to Shakey is a very
early Jeep-sized NASA
JPL Rover with tractor tread "wheels". The Museum also
contains a number of special surprises. On a shelf containing the
very first
personal computer kits, like the Altair, (from MITS, which briefly
employed Bill Gates as programmer just before he co-founded Microsoft with
Paul Allen), there is, just to the left of the Altair, a personal computer
that came out before it, the "Kenbak".
In another room there is the Nazi encoding machine "Enigma".
Finally, there is the ultimate in Wireless Mobile Computing, a famed
Nomadic Research Labs "Behemoth"
bike, which, as it's still surviving website
describes, is a "…computerized recumbent bicycle...autonomous
mobile information and communication platform... powered and propelled by
human and solar power, linked via satellite with global information
networks" - you may remember its creator, Stephen
Roberts, some years ago peddling across the country, wirelessly
transmitting trip reports typed out on specially designed,
handlebar-mounted keyboards, while he was simultaneously receiving GPS and
e-mail information viewed on a bicycle helmet-mounted wearable computer
heads-up display.
The following day was the
start of the Air Expo and, in historic Hangar 1's California Air and
Space Center (CASC),
the Tech
Space Pavilion. Many of NASA Ames high-tech departments were running
exhibit booths, with the robotics groups at roughly the center, while out
on the floor in front of them, in a large roped-off arena, was the K-9
exhibit. At the booth were NASA Ames roboticists like Anne
Wright, while out on the floor NASA Ames roboticist Maria
Bualat was demonstrating K-9's abilities, describing how K-9 is a
family member of the tribe that includes the JPL Rocky and FIDO Rover
series, all prototypes for the upcoming NASA Mars 2004 Mission. Both Maria
and Anne, along with NASA Ames roboticist Linda
Kobayashi, have attended
and given presentations at San Francisco Robotics Society of America
meetings. Maria also wrote the Rover
Control Software (in C++) that was sending command sequences
wirelessly from a laptop to K-9. At one point a
transmitted command sequence caused K-9 to independently rotate all
"six wheels on soil" and perform a pirouette 
.
Running the software was a local high school student, a
young lady who was spending this summer as a NASA Ames robotics intern.
I asked her how she got set up with the intern position and she answered
that her teacher, an intern at NASA Ames, got involved in the NASA Ames
USFIRST Robotics Competition, which she then participated in, which in
turn led to her teacher setting her up with the intern opportunity. I
mentioned how I'd also attended the original NASA Ames USFIRST kickoff
competition at Hangar 1 a few years back and was particularly inspired
by guest speaker Dave Lavery, Program Executive For Solar And Planetary
Exploration, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, as he described how NASA's
early Rover program, which involved truck-sized machines, was completely
turned around by an MIT student's summer intern robotics project at JPL.
The MIT intern developed, from off-the-shelf Radio Shack parts, a small
Rover named "Tooth" that utilized subsumption architecture to
perform tasks that the truck-sized Rover's were still unable to complete.
Dave reached into a box, pulled out and held up
Tooth, which he explained
led to the Rovers that NASA has since developed to conduct planetary
exploration, starting with the Rocky series that saw the successful '97
Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover Mission. Talking with the intern, I
was able to get a good look at Rover Control Station setup,
Software and
it's various control panels (1,
2, 3,
4, 5,
6, 7,
8). At one point
Maria jumped in to help debug some code with the intern, who in turn was
joined by another young lady roboticist. As my visit was wrapping up, and
noticing that, pretty much anywhere I looked, the roboticists were women,
I found myself reflecting on the contributions of such women robotists as
NASA JPL's Donna
Shirley, who managed the Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover
Mission, NASA Ames' Carol
Stoker who headed up the joint
Russian-American Mars Rover "Marsokhod" testing, and the efforts
of Maria, Anne, Linda & K-9's interns at Tech Space Pavilion (in
fact I found myself musing that, regarding any disparity between men and
women in engineering, it would appear at NASA, in robotics, from the looks
of things today, it could reasonably be argued that "Girls
Rule!" ;)
As I complete this report
I've received a follow-up news item regarding K-9's brother FIDO, from
Exploratorium Science Museum Webcast Production Assistant Alisa Mast-she
has emailed me that the upcoming NASA Mars 2004 Mission JPL Robotic Rover
"FIDO" (Field Integrated Design & Operations) desert field
trials tests will be the subject of an upcoming Exploratorium webcast., at
the Webcast Studio, on Monday August 19 '02 starting at 11am & lasting
about an hour. The webcast may be viewed from the Exploratorium
Webcast Live
link (there may also an archive version later).