Robotics Startup Gets Money For NASA’s Moon Exploration Rush

#News(Startup) [ via IoTGroup ]

Olis Robotics creates robot control technologies for underseas environments and also for space.
Olis Robotics
A Seattle startup just partnered with one of the biggest names in space, Maxar Technologies, to work on a new robotic mission that will head to the moon.
Olis Robotics will provide planning software for a Maxar robotic arm that will land on the moon in the coming years.
It’s all part of a larger push by NASA to study the moon and learn as much about it as possible as the agency works to land astronauts on the surface by 2024.
Just like robots on the moon, robots underwater need to deal with something called “latency” – or, the amount of time it takes for a signal to get from the human operator to the remote-controlled robot, working at a distance.
Dealing with latency is super-important to robot safety.
Unless that’s taken into account, a robot could do something foolish – such as driving itself into an object – simply because a human cannot respond in time.
Olis Robotics (formerly BluHaptics) began as a spin-off project at the University of Washington.
Olis Robotics says that its technology offers a universal operating system primed to help machines assist humans in their missions.
Credit: Olis Robotics
“We recognized that technology could be retrofitted to billions of dollars of [pre-existing] robots …
Olis’ software on the Maxar arm, which is called SAMPLR, will help it pick up rocks from the surface, filter the sand for analysis, and probe the surface.
Maxar’s leadership in space robotics has brought it and its subsidiaries to space and even to the surface of the Red Planet.
Most famously, a Canadian Maxar subsidiary known as Macdonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) provided the robotic arms on the space shuttle and space station.
Pickering says he hopes the new Maxar contract will increase the visibility for Olis Robotics.

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