Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Encino Park Robotics Club

Last Friday, April 15th, I visited the Robotics Club at Encino Park Elementary School and gave a slide presentation "Space Robots I Have Known".  At the beginning of the presentation, I passed around a couple of space program artifacts from my bookshelf: a wooden mockup of a spacecraft "black box", made of white pine, and a pushbutton "ENTER" switch from the Shuttle Orbiter's Cockpit Avionics Upgrade program, which was cancelled.

The presentation took about 40 minutes, and was followed by viewing of some live-action and animated videos showing the space robots in action.

The club members, all 5th graders, had many interesting questions about what those robots could do.

JPL Mars Rover "Curiosity" article and great animation

This article from IEEE Spectrum Robotics newsletter shows the complete landing and deployment sequence of this new robotic rover. 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/jpl-animation-shows-off-new-mars-rovers-harrowing-travel-plan