My name is Brian Roberts.
I'm the Head Robotic Technologist here at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Today, we're going to take a tour of the ROC
or the Robotic Operations Center.
As you enter the ROC, you see a room that's a little bit smaller than a
gymnasium at a school.
You'll notice that the walls are
all black and that's to simulate the darkness of space so we
can shut the lights out in the room and the robots will be
in an environment that will be as dark as it is in space.
So just like sports teams practice before they play a game, we practice with
robots as well.
The first robot you'll hear is our engineering unit of the eventual robot that
will fly in space.
The reason we build that is so we can work out all the details of how to put the
robot together,
make sure it works before we build the more expensive
flight unit.
So the sound you hear sounds like hail hitting a tin roof.
What you'll hear is the brakes on the robot coming on and off.
moving back and forth and you kind of hear a tinging sound as the seven pieces
of metal are hitting each other.
This robot is a hexapod which is a motion platform
on which we mount a satellite mock-up
and the robot then moves that mock-up,
simulating its motion as it would be moving through space.
What you'll hear are
the motors moving back and forth and it kind of sounds like a car engine revving
up and revving down
as you push the gas pedal
and get more acceleration, less acceleration.
You'll hear those motors
moving the six legs of the robot up and down back and forth in front of the
robot.
The last robot you'll hear is an industrial robot that's used by car companies
and
other factories to assemble furniture, assemble cars or paint cars.
So this robot is about the size of a human, maybe six feet or so,
and it's got seven degrees of freedom, so seven individual
actuators that move.
What you'll hear is it moving through our facility and much like the previous
robot,
you'll hear the motors kind of revving up and
revving down.
Thank you for spending some time today touring our Robotic Operations Facility
and listening to some of the robots that we
use to simulate robots working in space.