This Graduate Student Equips NASA’s Robots With Assembly Skills

elseif has not written about this yet · IEEE Spectrum describes it this way

Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016.Watching PBS specials on NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and seeing the live broadcast of the Curiosity rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA.Sarah DownsMEMBER GRADEGraduate student memberUNIVERSITY Texas A&M University in College StationMAJOR Electric engineeringThis year the IEEE graduate student member achieved that dream. For her final project as a master’s degree candidate in electrical engineering at the University of Tulsa, she worked on an algorithm in collaboration with NASA and the U.S. Air Force.The algorithm she developed enables a robot assembling satellites in space to insert an antenna into the correct spot, addressing robotics’s classic peg-in-hole problem of inserting an object into its corresponding hole.Now a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, D