# JSC News Release Log 1990/90-035

Public Affairs Specialist
NASA Johnson Space Center
(713) 483-5111
Kathie Krause
News Bureau Manager
Rice University
(713) 527-4807
Release No. 90-035
NASA, Universities Consortium to Study Space Station Robotics
A laboratory as big as Texas employing the state's brightest students will soon be put to work with NASA to aid in developing robotics for Space Station Freedom.
The NASA/JSC Universities Space Automation and Robotics Consortium will link robotics laboratories at Rice University, the University of Texas, the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M University with JSC labs to study the robotics tasks planned for Space Station Freedom. The labs will be interconnected by a computer network to allow the universities to remotely control each other's robots as well as those at JSC. Experiments can then be carried out in what will essentially be a statewide lab. The project, proposed to NASA by the four schools, will be funded by a $240,000 grant to begin before October.
The consortium was formed by the schools in 1989, all of which, excluding UTA, have been participants in past NASA robotics research.
"With the interconnected labs and the consortium, we'll be able to take advantage of all the different areas of expertise exhibited by the schools," Carl Adams, NASA project engineer, said. The schools’ areas of expertise include the machine vision and mobile robotics at Rice; manual controllers and modular robot architectures at UT; system architectures and artificial intelligence at A&M; and human performance and workloads at UTA. ​"People today use computer networks to exchange data, but we'll be using this network to control robots at the four universities and the JSC labs from remote facilities,“ said Prof. Rui de Figueiredo, Rice researcher and consortium chairman. “The universities got together and approached NASA with the idea to better coordinate our efforts and areas of specialty. It's a logical arrangement.“ The four universities jointly presented the proposed consortium to NASA, where Charles R. Price, chief of the Robotic Systems Development Branch at JSC, suggested a computer link among the labs to study simultaneous control of multiple robots.
The universities' areas of expertise are complementary, and, in addition to space station maintenance studies, an evaluation of future robotics applications in space will be conducted by the consortium. The connected labs will allow NASA a flexibility to use research conducted by the schools in a way that has not been possible before.
"We can be of great benefit to the Space Station Freedom Program," de Figueiredo said. “And the importance of the work, along with its posture on the cutting edge of robotics, will provide a strong motivation and a sense of real accomplishment for our students."
“we're trying to create one large lab," Adams added. "It's good for the schools, the students get to work on something that has a direct application, and it's good for us -- NASA gets the benefits of their work."
De Figueiredo chairs the consortium and is the project's principal investigator at Rice; Prof. Delbert Tesar is UT's principal investigator; Prof. George Kondraske is UTA’s principal investigator; and Prof. Richard Volz is A&M's principal investigator.