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Certificate of Excellence

Nice to be Certifiably Excellent

Nice to be Certifiably Excellent

Last week I was awarded another Certificate of Excellence at NASA for building and leading the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab.  I’m quite touched by the recognition!  Despite the fact that it feels to me like I’m just chugging along, working hard every day, with small incremental progress, I must be doing something right, since I’m getting multiple awards every year now.

Here is the current list since I returned to NASA in 2011 from being CTO of Apisphere Inc.

Awards:

  • Nov  2014 Ames Contractor Council Certificate of Excellence — Individual
  • May 2014 Space Flight Awareness Team Award, Ames Research Center International Space Station Team.
  • Dec 2013 Employee of the Quarter, ISRDS Contract, SGT Inc.
  • Dec 2013 Certificate of Achievement for Business Development
  • Aug 2013 Group Achievement Award, Smart SPHERES Team
  • March 2013 Certificate of Achievement for Leading Innovation, and academic and NASA collaboration on Tensegrity Robots.
  • Aug. 2012 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Fellow
  • Nov. 2011 Ames Contractor Council Certificate of Excellence for ISRDS Human Exploration Tele-Robotics Spheres Team.
Certificate of Excellence

Certificate of Excellence

Posted in Brains, Joy.

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Synaptic Motion Highlights

Over the last year I helped with Synaptic Motion — a neuroscience inspired dance performance.  See more about it in my prior post.

Today they just released a highlights video, and it is beautiful!  Check it out:

Synaptic Motion Highlights 2014 from Jodi Lomask on Vimeo.

Posted in Tensegrity.


SUPERball: First Motion!

I’m very pleased to share the first video of our newest prototype of the SUPERball Tensegrity Robot! We have recently completed the mechanical assembly of the robot and are currently finalizing the electronics and controls. In this video you can see the size and passive dynamics of the robot, some insights into its construction, and initial motion results from the first integrated actuator. Of particular interest is how one motor is able to change the overall structural stiffness and to cause the robot to roll over. Once fully finished, we will be using this prototype to explore control strategies for locomotion over a variety of terrain conditions encountered when exploring other planets. This video was submitted to the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2015) along with our paper:

Andrew P. Sabelhaus, Jonathan Bruce, Ken Caluwaerts, Pavlo Manovi, Roya Fallah Firoozi, Sarah Dobi, Alice M. Agogino, Vytas SunSpiral, “System Design and Locomotion of SUPERball, an Autonomous Tensegrity Robot.” Submitted to 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015), Seattle, Washington, May 2015.

Posted in Robots, Tensegrity.

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NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program Trailer

The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program has just released a program trailer which explains how they are supporting research into advanced aerospace mission and technology concepts, and they highlight some of our work. NIAC is a really great forward looking program that has been a big supporter of our tensegrity robotics research. Check out some of the other great ideas that they have been funding!

Posted in Robots, Tensegrity, Unknown.

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