Presentation on October 4, 8:00pm PST
in the CSM Planetarium
Speaker: Dr. Brian Coltin, Roboticist
NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group
Astrobee! The ISS Robotic Free Flyer
Free and open to the public. Free Parking in nearby lots.
The Astrobees are free-flying robots that operate inside the International Space Station (ISS) and were launched to the ISS in 2019. Designed as a mobile camera, an astronaut assistant, and a research platform, they have successfully performed hundreds of activities in space supporting dozens of research projects. The robots were designed to overcome multiple challenges unique to the ISS environment, including safety, upgradeability and maintainability, limited mass and computation, and unique localization challenges from lack of gravity and a constantly changing environment. In the future, robots will play a significant part in NASA’s mission to return to the Moon as well as other deep space missions. Robots such as Astrobee, have the capacity to become caretakers for future spacecraft, working to monitor and keep systems operating smoothly while crew are away. This talk will give an overview of the Astrobee robots, with an emphasis on Astrobee’s development, robotic software, and its successful use on the ISS.
Brian Coltin is a roboticist and computer scientist. with the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, where he’s the software lead for for the Astrobee robots helping make Astrobees fly autonomously inside the International Space Station. He has also worked on the VIPER rover, lunar localization, applying computer vision to Earth science, and more. In addition, he also lead a project to automatically map floods from satellite imagery for disaster response, as well as contributing to multiple open source releases of Astrobee, ISAAC, DELTA, and Crisis Mapping Toolkit.
Previously, Brian received his Phd from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, where he specialized in planning and scheduling for multi-robot systems. While there he worked on the CoBot robots, which have traveled over a thousand miles autonomously, performing tasks for users in a multi-story office building. His Ph.D. thesis focused on scheduling these robots to perform pickup and delivery tasks, with transferring items between robots. At CMU, he also competed at RoboCup soccer in the Standard Platform League with the NAO robots.
Brian’s research interests include planning and scheduling, multi-robot systems, localization, computer vision, path planning, machine learning, Earth science, and more. He also enjoys backpacking and climbing mountains.
