In 2018 I won a couple of the NASA contests from the AstroBee series in Freelancer:

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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/astrobee-challenges-series/

 

NASA is developing a (new) robotic assistant for the International Space Station (ISS) called AstroBee. This assistant navigates all over the ISS autonomously, helping astronauts with tasks as cam-cording and sensor measuring for example.

 

NASA crowdsourced the development of a key functionality of the system: A robot arm for the AstroBee, so it became capable of perching to the ISS walls and keep a fixed position when required. NASA has posted a few contests in order to address this design problem from different perspectives. I decided to participate in a couple of them and I was lucky to won two.

 

The first contest consisted of designing an Electrically Driven Clamp (EDC) as the end-effector for the AstroBee robotic arm. The second was about designing the whole electro-mechanical system for the robotic arm, like the mechanical architecture and the actuator and sensor selection for example. NASA evaluated my design among dozen and decided they where the best.

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Thanks NASA for the opportunity to participate in such amazing project.

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