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Robots, NASA, and The Future of Space Exploration

A Family Portrait of most of the major robotic systems at the D-RATS 2010 Field Test

As I’ve hinted at, my exciting news is that I have returned to NASA and am once more fully engaged in researching Human and Robotic Motion! This also explains why this blog has gone quiet for many weeks — I have been fully engaged in the period of transition and re-balancing my life.

The ATHLETE Robot standing tall at Base Camp. This is the robot I have been developing walking algorithms for.

This was accompanied by a wild burst of energy to pull our project together in time for an Agency-wide robotics field test called Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS) 2010, held at Black Point Lava Flow in Arizona. I have just returned from this adventure two weeks ago and am excited to share thoughts and pictures!

D-RATS is an annual field test led by NASA in collaboration with non-NASA research partners. The primary goal of D-RATS, is to do earth based experiments of future mission concepts and technologies. Thus we go to remote locations that have some analog aspects of exploring the moon or mars, and test out new robotic systems, mission control strategies, and approaches to how one explores.

The SEV rover. It can independently control its wheels so it can drive sideways, diagonal, or spin in place. It can also lift and lower its body to clear obstacles. I got to drive it for a while, which was excellent fun!

The importance of these last two aspects was an interesting lesson for me at my first field test at Moses Lake Sand Dunes two years ago.  It is easy to get excited about new technology, such as an advanced robot, but how do you control it from another planet without any ability to physically intervene? The details of how the ground control teams operate is altered by the introduction of new capabilities on-board the robot. Thus, in evaluating new technology, it is important to evaluate the entire operational scenario. Likewise, if you wish for your new technology to be adopted on a future mission, it helps to show how it fits into a realistic operational setting and how it impacts the way ground control operates.

The SEV Rovers were very photogenic

Of course, all the technology and operational controls exists to support the key question of what can we learn?  Science!  Exploration!  These are (mostly) the goals of space exploration.  As new instruments and robotic platforms are designed we need to evaluate the quality of the science that can be performed with them.  D-RATS evaluated this by sending the Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV) rovers (with 2 person “astronaut” teams on board each) and the ATHLETE rover on a 14 day traverse over the lava fields. The ground control included a science back-room staffed by geologists and other scientists who were not familiar with the geological history of the area. Over the period of the 14 day traverse the scientists and flight team directed the remote robots and astronauts in an effort to unravel the history of the area which includes a number of different lava flows and complex geological history. The resulting theories of the areas history can be compared to what is actually known and the effectiveness of the new technology and operations can be evaluated.

I was often stunned by the beauty of the robots at play.

A portable solar, wind, and cellular communications tower that collapses onto a trailer. Great for earth based uses.

Communication, flight control, support teams, and many other mission functions were located at a base-camp. This was also the location at which a number of other technology tests and demonstrations were conducted, including a Habitat Demonstration Unit, the Centaur 2 robot, a fuel cell system, and Green Trail’s portable solar-wind-communication system, to name a few. I arrived at the base-camp as the 14 day traverse was ending and watched with joy as the mock habitat on top of ATHLETE first became visible on the horizon, looking much like a futuristic vision of the western settlers wagon, or maybe a Lunabago.

My project, which I worked on with my colleague DW Wheeler, was to demonstrate planning and control of the ATHLETE robot walking over a rocky terrain using the “Footfall Planning” software we have been developing for the last four years.  This all happened at base-camp after the robots completed their traverse, so I was not directly involved in those aspects of the field test.  We were successful at the demonstration, and I will talk about it in detail in my next post.

Centaur 2 comes to my rescue

I will tell one funny story though — in order to demonstrate ATHLETE walking around rocks, I needed to gather a few large rocks at the robots feet.  I was busy rolling a boulder across the desert for this purpose when the new Centaur 2 robot came to my rescue. The team which had brought the robot and its new earth moving scoop were busy testing it and seeing what it was capable of. We were all impressed that it was able to pick up and carry the rock, which was heavy enough to occasionally cause Centaurs back wheels to come off the ground slightly. This little robot is intended to use tools like shown, and also to be a mobility platform for the Robonaut 2 humanoid (a *very* cool machine which I may get to work with again this year).

Like with previous field tests, DRATS was difficult, exhausting, stressful, and wonderful all at the same time.  Predictably, nothing works quite like you expect when you get there, and it is a mad scramble to get it all sorted out with very little time to spare.  It was especially challenging for us, because we were testing many things on the robot for the first time.  But, as I’ve seen before, all that hard work is also key to building friendships, community, and magical moments.  When it works — when the robot takes its first steps, it is a beautiful moment!  I’ve also seen, again and again, that the shared effort of creation is one of the best ways to build community. And in that respect, the DRATS field tests are wonderfully effective, bring together teams of robotics researchers from different NASA centers across the country, enabling the sharing of work, ideas, problem solving, plans, and thoughts about the future of space exploration.

I would like to end with a formal disclaimer — I do not work for NASA (I’m employed by a contracting company — SGT Inc.), and everything written here is my personal observations and is not part of my work.

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By Vytas SunSpiral – October 1, 2010

As the Earth and Sky Dance

This last weekend I was asked to share a few words on the topic of Love and Relationships during the magical marriage ceremony for my friends Leila and Matthew Madrone.  Leila is a wonderfully creative engineer who used to work at NASA.  She was the lead mechanical engineer for the Gigapan Imager – a robotic device used to capture super high resolution panorama images. The inspiration behind the Gigapan is to spread global cultural awareness by making immersive imagery cheaply available and easy to share.  Matthew is a talented musician working in a number of collaborations such as The Fingermonsters and Cubik & Origami, whose music has inspired me to joy and dance on many occasions.  In fact, their video for “The Box” is one of my favorite music videos ever. Check it out!

Taking the new last name of Madrone, a tree native to Northern California, the themes of Earth and Sky were woven through their wedding. I wrote the following poem at 20,000 feet in the air, flying home from the NASA Robotics Field Test I was just at (next post).  Many folks at the wedding liked the words very much, so I am sharing them with everyone else.  Enjoy!

As the Earth and Sky Dance

A poem for the wedding of

Leila & Matthew Madrone

By
Vytas SunSpiral

As the Earth and Sky Dance,
They play many roles for each other —

Leila Madrone — One of the best engineers I know

    • The stable earth, holding the center
    • The bright sky full of light and joy
    The deep electrical ground currents that bring lightning to life

While we recognize the dynamic changing roles of earth and sky, the beautiful thing is that we humans are even more dynamic than that — we will be every role for each other!

    Each of us will have our turn to be the strong support, or the inspired leader.
    Each of us will have our turn creating the music we dance to.
    Each of us will have our turn to be everything we admire in our partner.
    Each of us will have our turn to inspire our partner to be the most brilliant manifestation of human spirit possible.

As the Earth and Sky Dance,
They change each other.
Can you see it?

As we dance this dance of reflection, the music changes and our steps flow with the new tempo.

In our joy, we forget the bruised toes from learning new steps, and are amazed about who we are becoming together.

Matthew and Leila Madrone

After 20 years, can you find wonder in this person you are just getting to know?

After 40 years, will you learn something new about your partner?

Can you find the tingling magic of discovering a beautiful soul again and again??

Can you find new ways to seduce each other?

The person in your arms today is not the person you danced with yesterday.

Who are they?

Get to know them today.

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By Vytas SunSpiral – September 22, 2010

Fascia, Collagen, Motion, and Bodywork

It is common to visualize our own bodies in a static manner “my quads are here”, or “these two muscles run next to each other.”  But we are in constant motion and our muscles and fascial surfaces are constantly sliding and shifting around each other as we change how we are holding our bodies. Every muscle is responsible for certain lines of force and tension, and as we move and change our shape we shorten some lines and lengthen others.  Ideally all the surfaces are free to move and we can achieve our desired motion with minimal effort, but this is rarely the case.

The body is constantly laying down new collagen fibers which add stiffness to our structure.  One way of thinking about this is as an energy saving adaptive process of the body. If an area of the body does not need to move much, instead of holding the associated muscle at a constant tension, the body can stiffen up the structure there so the muscle doesn’t have to work so hard. This is analogous to how a plant or tree stiffens up its primary truck, allowing it to get woody and strong to support the load.

The following video is an excellent, (and fun!) introduction to this issue.  You will get to see the collagen fibers — what he calls “the fuzz” on actual cadavers and see how it affects motion.

What I take away from this video is an answer to the question “how does your body know where to add collagen to stiffen up a muscle?” The answer is that it doesn’t “know” where to add collagen, rather you are constantly producing collagen along all the muscles and fascia.  Anywhere that you are actively using and moving your muscles will stay loose and free to move, but areas that are being held stationary will continue to stiffen up.  In other words, your body doesn’t have an intentional response, but it naturally reinforces whatever daily patterns of use that you are engaged in. This makes me want to jump out of my chair and move my body!

Another question worth asking from this is: “If muscles are fuzzed up and cannot slide freely, what happens?”  Besides limiting your range of motion, adhered (i.e. stuck together) muscles are a major source of joint pain.  Imagine two muscles that cross each other at some angle — if they are glued together then when you pull on one, you end up pulling on the other.  This causes forces to distribute through your body in inappropriate ways.  Often the result is that the joints get pulled out of their optimal alignment and instead of passing forces across the joint cleanly the forces pass into small muscles or tendons which were not designed to take that sort of load.  Those muscles will become strained and locked tight, often stiffening up and causing issues to cascade further through the body.  As the body tightens up, joints are pulled tight, causing bones and ligaments to rub and other forms of internal irritation and damage.

Since our body is a single complex web of tension (see “Introduction to Biotensegrity”), changing the tension structure locally (i.e. across a muscle or two), can have a cascading impact on the entire structure. This leads to the common problem that an adhesion (“fuzz”) in one part of the body results in pain in a joint somewhere else.  An example would be having an injury in your calf that tightens up the network locally such that the hamstring is also pulled tight, which results in lower back pain.

So, stretching and using our bodies will keep our body adapting for motion! If you spend most of your day sitting in a chair or a car, you should think about how much daily motion muscles in your back and hips are getting. This is critical if you still want to be dancing and running around joyfully when you are 80 years old! (I know I would like to! <grin>)  But what do you do if you already have scar tissue or other adhesions (from under-used muscles, etc) that prevent you from moving freely now?  If the adhesion is thick enough, you will not be able to loosen it just through stretching and motion. That is where bodywork, such as massage or other physical techniques, comes in.

A great book for learning more about the fascia, and the global network of how forces flow through it is Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists. Tom Myers has been doing dissections with fresh cadavers, which allows him to extract long chains of fascia before it hardens. Traditional dissection techniques with preserved cadavers cause the various layers of fascia to harden and glue together, which makes it very difficult to understand the functional structures of the body.

UPDATE To see some of my recent work on applying fascia centric concepts to robotics, see my post on a robotic tensegrity snake, and a video of a lecture I gave in Switzerland.

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By Vytas SunSpiral – May 25, 2010

Tensegrity Structures are Made for Motion

While our concept of bones as load bearing structural elements stems from well-understood engineering concepts, it is important to realize that most of our engineering knowledge is geared towards solving a different set of problems than those faced by our bodies.  The vast majority of structural engineering tasks are focused on constructing stationary structures that maintain a reasonably constant relationship with gravity.  In other words, when we build houses (or even moving things like cars and most robots), we generally assume that the structure will stay still and will not perform handstands. Animals, on the other hand, must be robust to any orientation with respect towards gravity.  Beyond that, we animals must be able to resist and generate forces into the world from any unexpected direction as we scramble, hunt, run, climb, dance, and play through life.

In general, continuous compression structures are optimized for a single path of forces to flow through them to the ground. As long as the forces the structure will experience over its lifetime are understood, one can build support exactly where it is needed.  I’ve always loved the medieval cathedral’s flying buttresses as a good visual image of this.

A Medieval Flying Buttress

The infrastructure that has been built is great for holding the tall walls and roof of the cathedral up. But, if you pushed on the cathedral in an unexpected direction (such as sideways on the middle of the piers as indicated with the arrow below) the structure may fail because it cannot dissipate the applied force.

Due to their integration through the tension network, tensegrity structures are uniquely capable of globally distributing forces and are very robust to forces applied from unexpected directions. In the image below, if one pushes down on the indicated strut, the force is globally distributed through the whole structure. Thus, there is less chance of a single component failing, as all the components share in dissipating the extra force.

This quality makes tensegrity structures tolerant of being reoriented in the field of gravity. While gravity is always applying force in a single direction, how the structure experiences that force is dependent on its orientation relative to the ground. Thus, when we do handstands, the force of gravity is applied to our bodies very differently than when we are standing.  Tensegrity structures can deal with this variability in applied forces much better than continuous compression structures.

With Gravity constant, we experience forces from all directions as we move through the world

Many large modern buildings that have large spans or are in earthquake prone regions incorporate concepts from tensegrity structures to take advantage of this robustness to unexpected shaking forces. But beyond that, tensegrity design has not taken over modern construction techniques despite a steady stream of enthusiasm from young architectural and art students. The major problem is that tensegrity structures are not rigid — they oscillate and vibrate as forces integrate through the tension network.  Thus, to build static structures such as art sculptures and buildings that will hold still, high levels of tension need to be applied.

But this is exciting! Living animals are never static!  We are constantly breathing, moving, vibrating, and oscillating. We are constantly changing our orientation to gravity, and dealing with unexpected forces from every possible direction. These are all properties that tensegrity structures are well suited to deal with. So, my conclusion from all this is that tensegrity structures are an excellent design choice for a something that needs to move, but they are a poor design choice for static rigid structures (other than surprisingly beautiful art).  This, of course, all leads back to the Biotensegrity theory that I wrote about last week. (“Introduction to Biotensegrity“)

UPDATE To see some of my recent work on applying fascia centric concepts to tensegrity robotics, see my post on a robotic tensegrity snake, development of a tensegrity based planetary lander, and a video of a lecture I gave in Switzerland.

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By Vytas SunSpiral – April 30, 2010