Internship at NASA Johnson Space Center

10 Aug 2021

Introduction

For the past 3 months, I’ve been a robotics intern in the robotics department at NASA Johnson Space Center. I’ve had the privillge of working along side NASA engineers on various projects.

Projects

Microchariot

One of the projects I worked on was coding the safety and communication features of a lunar Microchariot. We used an Atmega128 microcontroller and C. We implemented PWM control, UART communications, and variable speed controls.

Lidar

Another project I worked on was developing a lidar attachment for Houston Police Department to add to their robots. The system would provide a map of the room by simpily driving the robot through the space. The system utlized ROS to run SLAM and then transmitted the data via a locally hosted website.

Bombtech Challenge

As a part of the internship, I participated in the annual Bombtech workshop hosted by the United States Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate. We created an RF-based mesh network using the nRF24 library that could remotely control RC trucks. The challenge is meant to develop various technologies to aid the bomb defusal process, giving bomb technicians knowledge about cutting-edge technologies.

Moving Forward

This has been one of the best summers of my life and working at NASA has been a dream. It has truly been a wonderful experience and I’ve learned so much.