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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, October 31, 2016 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Dr. Gregory S. Chirikjian

"Self-Replicating Robots for Lunar Development"

ABSTRACT -- In-Situ Resource Utilization has been discussed for more than 60 years, going back at least as far as the undergraduate thesis of Arthur C. Clarke and the work of German aerospace engineer Krafft Ehricke. The idea of harvesting lunar resources to bootstrap a self-perpetuating human presence in space, with manufacturing facilities on the moon as the first step, was studied in the NASA Freitas report of the late 1970s.

What has been missing in the intervening decades has been a concrete architecture with robots used to harvest lunar materials (possibly remote controlled from earth). Enabled by new ways to harvest solar energy, and possibility enabled by water in the lunar south polar regions, this idea is being discussed again.

This talk reviews an overall system architecture (which was funded in a Phase I NIAC Award in 2004) in which robots manufacture structures and other robots from in situ resources. Videos of laboratory prototypes of robots that show the feasibility of this idea will be shown and discussed.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Gregory S. Chirikjian received undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1992. Since 1992, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, where he has been a full professor since 2001. From 2004-2007 he served as department chair. His research interests include robotics, applications of group theory in a variety of engineering disciplines, and the mechanics of biological macromolecules. He is a 1993 National Science Foundation Young Investigator, a 1994 Presidential Faculty Fellow, and a 1996 recipient of the ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal. In 2008 he became a Fellow of the ASME, and in 2010 he became a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the author of more than 200 journal and conference papers and primary author on three books: Engineering Applications of Noncommutative Harmonic Analysis (2001) and Stochastic Models, Information Theory, and Lie Groups, Vols. 1+2. (2009,2011). In 2016 and expanded edition of his 2001 book came out as a Dover book under the new title: Harmonic Analysis for Engineers and Applied Scientists.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov