Towards a Turn-Key Graphical Programming Suite for Autonomous Robotic Manufacturing and Teleoperation of Remote Robotic Assets

NASA has long term goals of autonomous habitat construction, vehicle repair, and human-robot teams for space exploration. More immediately, NASA has multiple dual-armed manipulators onboard the ISS, in R2 and Dextre. To facilitate NASA's needs, TRACLabs has created the CRAFTSMAN software toolkit for improved control and teleoperation of robotic manipulators. This software improves the state of the art by focusing on 3D user interfaces for commanding, on advanced task programming for robots to better interact with the world, and on smooth Cartesian trajectories needed for manipulation and tool usage.The technologies in CRAFTSMAN are also directly applicable to the domain of flexible manufacturing. Our investor, Magna International, is one of the top automotive parts suppliers in the world, and is extremely interested in improving the efficiency and quality of their plants through improvements to their automation capabilities. While they are already a customer of the CRAFTSMAN product, they would like to see this product improved before extending its use beyond custom, high-cost, low production use cases. By both integrating improved path planning capabilities and cooperative multi-arm coordination into the CRAFTSMAN software suite, we can increase the usability of CRAFTSMAN by non-expert users, while also increasing the use cases in the manufacturing domain. By integrating these two technologies, we expect CRAFTSMAN to be at TRL 7, which would help increase our customer base, while providing NASA with software directly applicable to its current and future robotics assets.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.