In association with NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., the students of Academy of Art University Industrial Design designed a user interface during this semester.
With this new development, the future astronauts can remotely operate a robot for lunar expedition. This initiation gained success as three students will pursue this project along with NASA engineers as part of summer interns. This semester project was exhibited on May 23, during the Academy of Art’s annual Spring Show at the Cannery Building in San Francisco.
In this semester, students constantly communicated with NASA engineers at the Academy of Art University and NASA Ames. Students employed various design skills to achieve this project. Storyboarding, brainstorming, task analysis, sketching ideation, and rendering were part of this project. The students’ work will support future space missions, where astronauts will control a robot that functions on the moon or other planets.
New opportunities for exploration will be ensured from future lunar expeditions by humans or on Mars and other destinations. As the space operation by the astronauts is limited, robots will be a boon to human explorers as it is capable of being remotely controlled from the ground with respect to the spacecraft in orbit. Robots are capable of performing dexterous tasks, highly repetitive or long-duration operations ahead of human potential.
During the summer of 2013, NASA will conduct an experiment for astronauts on the space station to remotely operate the "K10" mobile robot on Earth. K10 will be used by the astronauts to layout a simulated radio telescope in Ames, on an outdoor terrain. For this initiative, several capturing images will be captured using the robot's cameras and various measurements will be made with various other robot-mounted instruments. NASA will perform this engineering test using student designs.
Source: http://www.academyart.edu/