Good Morning, my name is Casey Joyce. I'm the Robonaut Operations lead here at the Robonaut
lab at Johnson Space Center and I'm here today to talk a little bit about the Robonaut 2
project. This is a joint venture between NASA and
General Motors with the common goal of building a humanoid robot that can work safely with
people and actually use the same tools as humans use.
To accomplish that, we've built in a lot of safeties into this robot. This is our A
unit. We have a very complex naming system for our robots. This is the A unit. We also
have a B unit, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
And behind me is our C unit, which is an exact replica of the one that's on the Space Station.
So, we actually have, um, three degrees of freedom in the neck and this robot has four
eyes or cameras; two standard cameras and two high definition cameras, that are
used for the vision processing. It's a little different; it doesn't think
with its head, all the processers are actually in the belly.These are where the computers
and the main processors are stored and they communicate with all of the joints of the
robot as it moves. One of the key things and common goals between NASA and General
Motors was to develop a robot that is safe to work side by side with a human.
So, the way this robot runs is it drives its joints based on torque values and it knows
the torque that it needs to drive the joint to a set position. We also have a torque limit
and what you can see here is it's hitting the torque limit and passing it.
So, it's sort of like someone bumping into you. It's got the same thing, same feel
to it and you can tell that it's very flexible. I can move it around and it's really
waiting for me to get out of the way and it will then continue its motion. And that's
what makes it safe to work next to a human. Now, we also have additional sensors. We have
six degrees of freedom, four sensors, one in each forearm, one in each shoulder, and
those will measure what we call jerk forces. So a sudden impact, if it's moving fast, and
it hits something or if it's just doing something that you don't like, you can kind of give
it a quick jerk and it will safe itself and shut the motors off.
One of the other main advancements for Robonaut 2, as opposed to its predecessor,
Robinaut 1, is the dexterity in the hands, so what we are going to show you here is,
a quick demo of its range of motion with its arms as well as the dexterity in its fingers.
This is very important, because the more dexterity you have in the hands,
the more humanlike it is. So we can actually use the same tools as human s use or astronauts
if we're up in space. So, as you can see, it's got the ability to
close all of its fingers individually and we'll also show that it can touch the fingers
and the thumb together.
So this dexterity in the hands, allows us to assist astronauts or people on the ground
using the same tools. If you ever ask somebody to hold a tool for you, sometimes they
can complain a little bit. The great thing about Robonaut is it will hold that tool for
as long as you want without really complaining, but maybe a little bit.
The other thing you may have noticed is that Robonaut does not have legs yet and actually
we are designing and building those legs right here in this lab and we hope to launch them
to the Space Station next summer in the July time frame and the astronauts onboard will
attach them to the upper torso. And after we do a lot of checkouts, make
sure everything is working properly, and the safety systems are there and working,
we'll actually be moving around inside the Space Station.
This will be our kind of check out phase where we take everything that we learned from
moving around inside the space station and apply it to when we go outside the Space Station
and actually walk around outside with the ultimate goal of actually helping the astronauts
when they're performing spacewalks. So, we can, perform some of the tasks and offload
them when they perform more important tasks.