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NASA OSTEM Internship

Langley Research Center

I worked on the LANDO team in the In-Space Servicing, Assembly, Manufacturing (ISAM) branch, developing an autonomous robotic arm to be used on a lunar lander for payload handling capabilities. My role was to develop a Verification and Validation plan to ensure that the robotic arm behaves properly both in the physical and simulation environments. The plan I created focuses on testing the system's pose estimation using perception sensors, fiducial markers, encoders, sensor fusion, and kinematics. At the end of my internship, I created and delivered a presentation of the work I did over the summer.

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*Note: Portions of the presentation have been omitted in order to make it publicly available.

Skills Learned

ROBOTICS

  • Kinematics (forward and inverse)

  • Coordinate systems, reference frames, joint space, and cartesian space

  • Pose estimation; defining pose with position + orientation

    • Using perception sensors with fiducial markers; using sensor fusion​

  • Representing orientation with Quaternions, Euler anglers, Roll Pitch Yaw (RPY), and Transformation matrices

  • Types of joints (continuous, revolute, prismatic, etc.)

  • Degrees of freedom

  • Robot workspace

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COMPUTER SKILLS

  • ROS2

    • Defining a robot with a URDF or SRDF

    • Using macros and xacro files

    • Creating packages, nodes, topics, and message types

    • Publishing/Subscribing, Actions, Services, Clients

    • Obtaining relevant data through topic echos, nodes, and rosbags

  • Gazebo

    • Integrating with ROS2, loading a URDF

    • Performing simulations

    • Logging, filtering, processing data results

  • Gitlab, Docker

  • Linux environment

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OTHER SKILLS

  • Verification & Validation, understanding requirements

  • Research

  • Technical Writing

  • Thorough documentation

  • Presentations

  • Professional Communication

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