News Archive

Riding the rocky roads of Mars – University of Reading

In 1997 a small roving robot called Sojourner successfully explored a region of Mars for a period of several weeks navigating and recording difficult terrain in preparation for a future landing. This month, concurrent with the British-led Beagle 2 mission, more NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MERS) will undertake longer-range investigations with a pioneering robot colony. Later in this decade NASA expects to launch a mobile Mars Science Laboratory mission that will operate for several years. Dr Paul Schenker, the NASA scientist working on the MERS project is coming to talk to schoolchildren in the School of Systems Engineering about space robotics and the tiny robot Sojourner's explorations on Mars on Friday 27 June. Paul will describe the recent research in space robotics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab at CIT in Pasadena where this work has been developed and take questions from the children. Later in the day the team will give an illustrated presentation about the potential for future explorations and planetary habitat with networked robotic teams. They will describe some of the problems and other directions of mobile space robotic exploration beyond Mars. Beyond these missions lies the potential of far more aggressive Mars and lunar exploration and ultimately, sustaining human/robot teamed exploration and development of space. For further information contact Carol Derham or Sue Rayner Tel: 0118 378 8004/5 Notes to Editors: Talk to Children by Paul Schenker of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology Date: Friday 27 June 12 noon Venue: Department of Computer Science, Common Room, The University of Reading Presentation by Paul Schenker "The Expanding Venue and Persistence of Planetary Exploration: a mobile robotics perspective" Chair Gerard McKee, University of Reading Date: Friday 27 June 2.30pm Venue: Nike Theatre, Agriculture Building, The University of Reading Biographies: Dr. Paul S. Schenker is Manager, Mobility Systems Concept Development Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, Pasadena and as such, responsible for JPL R&D in planetary mobility and robotics. He has led the development of robotic systems that include the Field Integrated Design & Operations Rover (FIDO), Planetary Dexterous Manipulator (MarsArm, microArm), Robot Assisted Microsurgery System (RAMS), Robotic Work Crew (RWC), and All Terrain Explorer (ATE/Cliff-bot), with resulting technology contributions to NASA missions. Dr Schenker is active in the IEEE, Optical Society of America, and SPIE. He has served as an elected Board member and 1999 President of the last; he currently serves as an elected member of the National Academy of Science/United States Advisory Committee to the International Commission for Optics. Dr Gerard McKee’s research interests focus on the design, architecture and application of robotics technology. The key theme of the research is the development of a set of robotics hardware and software modules and a set of techniques for top-down design and bottom-up emergence of robot architectures and systems. He has developed, in collaboration with Paul Schenker (JPL), the concepts of both Visual Acts, a model for automated camera placement to assist operators during teleoperation tasks, and Networked Robotics, the concept of composing robotics systems from modular, reconfigurable robotics resources distributed across a network. He has also developed with his students the MARS model for modelling and reasoning about modular robotics systems and the DEIMOS software environment that implements the MARS model. He has a long standing research association with the JPL in the USA. He has been a Visiting Research Scientist at JPL’s Mechanical and Robotics Technologies Group and a Visiting Research Fellow at the MIT Field Robotics Laboratory. See Gerard McKee’s homepage for more information.