In-Orbit Robot Autonomy Advanced by NASA SBIR Award
NASA has awarded a Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to PickNik Robotics for the development of in-orbit robot autonomy technology for advanced planning capabilities for robots in microgravity environments.
“The Phase II contract period is an exciting time, as small businesses put their ideas into practice and develop prototypes attractive to NASA and private investors.”
NASA SBIR Program Executive Jason L. Kessler.
PickNik is a robotics software technology company founded in 2015 and headquartered in Boulder, CO. PickNik is the maintainer of the open-source MoveIt project, a widely used robotic motion planning framework within the Robot Operating System (ROS). The award was announced June 8, and the amount was not disclosed.
"We are excited to be collaborating with NASA in pushing the frontier of manipulator robotics beyond factories and warehouses, and into the most difficult domains," commented Dr. Dave Coleman PickNik, founder and CEO.
"PickNik's aim is to make robotics easier to use so that more people can operate them in complex environments. We believe integrating this automation while enabling human-in-the-loop intervention makes for the simplest teleop solution," Dr. Mark Moll, Director of Research at PickNik, added.
PickNik's in-orbit robot autonomy technology addresses a common gap in deploying robotic arms into environments, where full autonomy is still too difficult. Instead, a human operator is able to supervise and quickly intervene when the robot gets stuck. PickNik plans to widely release the system terrestrially in Fall 2021 under the name MoveIt Studio.
“The Phase II contract period is an exciting time, as small businesses put their ideas into practice and develop prototypes attractive to NASA and private investors,” said NASA SBIR Program Executive Jason L. Kessler in a news release announcing all of the Phase-II recipients. “The selected technologies have displayed great potential impacts for their respective sectors, and we are proud to continually invest in today’s booming aerospace economy through these small businesses.”
MoveIt Studio gives technicians access to the advanced algorithmic capabilities provided by MoveIt within an accessible user interface. MoveIt Studio enables operators to specify complex sequences of motions for robots (such as Robonaut 2) in unstructured environments, including the International Space Station and the future Lunar Gateway. This allows the operator to think in terms of what the robot needs to do next, rather than how.
(Image provided with PickNik news release)