The AZ
What journey is complete without a trip report at the end?
We arrived Saturday 9/2 and drove out to the site. When we arrived at the hotel where we would be staying (which is really more of a ski lodge, those rooms were big), everyone was amused to find that Rob's room's reservation was for the wrong days and he didn't have a room. Since I was supposed to be staying with Rob, this was a little annoying to me, but it was no big deal and we both crashed in other people's rooms that night.
The first day where we actually drove out to the crater was for setting up the camp. All our stuff had been packed into a bunch of modified shipping containers. In order to get them off the flatbeds that were carrying them they had to rent the use of a crane. I forgot my camera that day so I don't have any pictures of the 75000 pound crane that they drove out to the desert for the job. This thing was huge and really neat to watch. The rest of us spent a lot of time setting up tents and then, once the containers were in place, securing the tents to them so they wouldn't blow away.
The next day was spent finishing the camp set up (we were just about done, but groups from other centers were still arriving) and checking out the various robots to make sure that they weren't damaged during shipping somehow. All the following days were spent running tests on the robots. The actual test plans are pretty boring, so I won't go into those. Suffice to say that everything on SCOUT worked as planned, so we were ready when it came to the test runs working with the other robots.
The other groups that were represented out there were:
There were probably some other groups out there that I'm missing. I know there were some people from Glenn, but I never saw them and I have no idea what they were doing. There may also have been other media people not associated with DLN (maybe the PAO) but I'm not sure. Someone hired professional photographers with hi-def video (and regular) cameras to take lots of pictures of everything. I'm sure the PAO will release something about this with the best pictures in a while.
Now I'll talk a little about each robot. First, Centaur; these guy's robot didn't do very much as a robot (it was teleoperated most of the time) or look cool or anything. Our team spent more time talking about how much they hated this robot than just about anything else. There is some inter-branch rivalry between the Centaur team and SCOUT.
Ames brought this little K-10 robot (and a complete spare) with them. It's a small box with a bunch of cameras sticking out all over. The K-10 team brought their own fake rocks with them, for which they were ribbed mercilessly. I thought this robot was pretty neat, since it can pivot in place. I got to listen to one of the guys talk about the different things that they are working on doing with the cameras. They take a bunch of pictures at different exposure levels and then composite them together to eliminate over and under exposed sections of a picture. The resulting image looks really strange because there are no shadows. There are other things it can do but that's the only one that I got to see a presentation for. It's path finding seemed to work pretty well, especially compared with the poor performance of ours and Centaur's system (we use the same software).
No one understands the point of the Athlete robot. It's a big hexagonal thing with wheels on the ends of its legs. It seems like it should be able to go really fast over just about any terrain, but it's actually really slow. The purported main task that it's being designed for is to lift and move modules around on the moon or Mars. What we couldn't figure out was why you would want to move these modules around enough to warrant building a (very heavy) robot for the purpose. At least it looks cool. I didn't get to talk to the JPL people much, and they mostly kept to themselves in their special bus, of which the other teams were jealous.
The suits I saw don't seem to be incorporating any really fascinating new technology. The hard suit which was meant to be able to be used for zero preparation EVAs has been redesigned to use a lower pressure, so there really isn't a point in it being hard anymore. It weights ~120 lbs, which might not be a lot in space or on other planets, but it made it really hard on the poor guys walking around (very carefully) in them. They liked SCOUT a lot because they could ride in it. The other suit was (only) 84 lbs, and looked a lot like the suit's we're using now.
I should also talk a bit about SCOUT. Since I was working on it, I know the most about it and its capabilities. The rover can move autonomously between predefined way-points, avoid obstacles (sometimes), and follow people walking around. These are the main things that are neat to demonstrate. We were working on getting it to work on autonomously collecting geophone data and other things. The Mobile Agents team worked with us and the suit people, as their system lets the suited subjects to give commands to SCOUT verbally ("Follow me", "Take a picture", etc). We also had people from Houston remotely commanding the rover to do things. We also had the ACES people teleoperate the vehicle. For my own system, I got it to be within 0.2 Amp-hours of the actual draw after a whole day, and my "planning" component worked as it was supposed to, even if it can't actually do a lot yet.
Personally, I was pretty bored and kind of depressed the whole time. Hanging out with a bunch of old married guys isn't that great. They were all nice and most of them were somewhat interesting to talk to, but I didn't really feel that I was fitting in. They would talk about their kids or their wives and I would just have to sit there in silence most of the time. Toward the end of the trip I think they were stating to view me as part of their group, so that's good I guess. It didn't help anything that two days after I got there I got sick and felt physically pretty miserable for the majority of the trip.
I took a lot of pictures, but I need to name some of them still. I'll reduce their size from super enormous and post some of the better ones later. In fact, I may start a thread on SA with them.
We arrived Saturday 9/2 and drove out to the site. When we arrived at the hotel where we would be staying (which is really more of a ski lodge, those rooms were big), everyone was amused to find that Rob's room's reservation was for the wrong days and he didn't have a room. Since I was supposed to be staying with Rob, this was a little annoying to me, but it was no big deal and we both crashed in other people's rooms that night.
The first day where we actually drove out to the crater was for setting up the camp. All our stuff had been packed into a bunch of modified shipping containers. In order to get them off the flatbeds that were carrying them they had to rent the use of a crane. I forgot my camera that day so I don't have any pictures of the 75000 pound crane that they drove out to the desert for the job. This thing was huge and really neat to watch. The rest of us spent a lot of time setting up tents and then, once the containers were in place, securing the tents to them so they wouldn't blow away.
The next day was spent finishing the camp set up (we were just about done, but groups from other centers were still arriving) and checking out the various robots to make sure that they weren't damaged during shipping somehow. All the following days were spent running tests on the robots. The actual test plans are pretty boring, so I won't go into those. Suffice to say that everything on SCOUT worked as planned, so we were ready when it came to the test runs working with the other robots.
The other groups that were represented out there were:
- Centaur: Also from JSC
- K-10: from Ames
- Athlete: from JPL
- Space Suits: from JSC and KSC
- ACES (not a robot): from JSC
- DLN (Distance Learning Network): from somewhere I don't know
- Mobile Agents: maybe from Ames, I don't know
There were probably some other groups out there that I'm missing. I know there were some people from Glenn, but I never saw them and I have no idea what they were doing. There may also have been other media people not associated with DLN (maybe the PAO) but I'm not sure. Someone hired professional photographers with hi-def video (and regular) cameras to take lots of pictures of everything. I'm sure the PAO will release something about this with the best pictures in a while.
Now I'll talk a little about each robot. First, Centaur; these guy's robot didn't do very much as a robot (it was teleoperated most of the time) or look cool or anything. Our team spent more time talking about how much they hated this robot than just about anything else. There is some inter-branch rivalry between the Centaur team and SCOUT.
Ames brought this little K-10 robot (and a complete spare) with them. It's a small box with a bunch of cameras sticking out all over. The K-10 team brought their own fake rocks with them, for which they were ribbed mercilessly. I thought this robot was pretty neat, since it can pivot in place. I got to listen to one of the guys talk about the different things that they are working on doing with the cameras. They take a bunch of pictures at different exposure levels and then composite them together to eliminate over and under exposed sections of a picture. The resulting image looks really strange because there are no shadows. There are other things it can do but that's the only one that I got to see a presentation for. It's path finding seemed to work pretty well, especially compared with the poor performance of ours and Centaur's system (we use the same software).
No one understands the point of the Athlete robot. It's a big hexagonal thing with wheels on the ends of its legs. It seems like it should be able to go really fast over just about any terrain, but it's actually really slow. The purported main task that it's being designed for is to lift and move modules around on the moon or Mars. What we couldn't figure out was why you would want to move these modules around enough to warrant building a (very heavy) robot for the purpose. At least it looks cool. I didn't get to talk to the JPL people much, and they mostly kept to themselves in their special bus, of which the other teams were jealous.
The suits I saw don't seem to be incorporating any really fascinating new technology. The hard suit which was meant to be able to be used for zero preparation EVAs has been redesigned to use a lower pressure, so there really isn't a point in it being hard anymore. It weights ~120 lbs, which might not be a lot in space or on other planets, but it made it really hard on the poor guys walking around (very carefully) in them. They liked SCOUT a lot because they could ride in it. The other suit was (only) 84 lbs, and looked a lot like the suit's we're using now.
I should also talk a bit about SCOUT. Since I was working on it, I know the most about it and its capabilities. The rover can move autonomously between predefined way-points, avoid obstacles (sometimes), and follow people walking around. These are the main things that are neat to demonstrate. We were working on getting it to work on autonomously collecting geophone data and other things. The Mobile Agents team worked with us and the suit people, as their system lets the suited subjects to give commands to SCOUT verbally ("Follow me", "Take a picture", etc). We also had people from Houston remotely commanding the rover to do things. We also had the ACES people teleoperate the vehicle. For my own system, I got it to be within 0.2 Amp-hours of the actual draw after a whole day, and my "planning" component worked as it was supposed to, even if it can't actually do a lot yet.
Personally, I was pretty bored and kind of depressed the whole time. Hanging out with a bunch of old married guys isn't that great. They were all nice and most of them were somewhat interesting to talk to, but I didn't really feel that I was fitting in. They would talk about their kids or their wives and I would just have to sit there in silence most of the time. Toward the end of the trip I think they were stating to view me as part of their group, so that's good I guess. It didn't help anything that two days after I got there I got sick and felt physically pretty miserable for the majority of the trip.
I took a lot of pictures, but I need to name some of them still. I'll reduce their size from super enormous and post some of the better ones later. In fact, I may start a thread on SA with them.