TRACLabs
After graduating in December 2010 I had 6 months to spend before starting grad school, so I went on an extended internship with TRACLabs in Houston, TX. TRACLabs is a small company that does automation and robotics research and development work for NASA and the Defense Department.
My work centered on developing and using TRACBot, a powered wheelchair – based development robot. During the spring and summer Patrick, Mars, Bryn, and I significantly upgraded TRACBot from
to
I worked on a number of projects over the spring and summer, here are some highlight videos:
Beat-Based Gestures with Brown University
[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Six7g8lMM]
Leader Following
[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55F928QVXOI]
Wounded Soldier Extraction
[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0orJftpHYso]
And some pictures:
One of the first shots of the robot, pre-improvements.
Celebrating National Robotics Week at Space Center Houston. I'm running the tracking demo, letting SCH visitors get an understanding of how vision-based tracking works.
See also Dave's writeup about the
event.
By the start of the summer TRACBot had a new deck with mounts for two reconfigurable, 7 degree-of-freedom arms and three general-purpose computers.
We like promo shots...
The wounded soldier demo took most of the summer to develop and worked thanks to my fellow interns Nicolae Stiurca and Jonathan Realmuto, as well as the efforts of Patrick, Eric, Scott, Seth, Jim, Mars, and Bryn.
Letter in Support of NASA & Commercial Crew #PennyForNASA
Gallery