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National Aeronautics and Space Administration Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center Houston, Texas 77058 AC 713 483-5111

Rh James Hartsfield Public Affairs Specialist

NASA Johnson Space Center

(713) 483-5111

Kathie Krause

News Bureau Manager

Rice University

(713) 527-4807

Release No. 90-035

NASA, Universities Consortium to Study Space Station Robotics

A laboratory as big as Texas employing the state's brightest students will soon be put to work with NASA to aid in developing robotics for Space Station Freedom.

The NASA/JSC Universities Space Automation and Robotics Consortium will link robotics laboratories at Rice University, the University of Texas, the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M University with JSC labs to study the robotics tasks planned for Space Station Freedom. The labs will be interconnected by a computer network to allow the universities to remotely control each other's robots as well as those at JSC. Experiments can then be carried out in what will essentially be a statewide lab. The project, proposed to NASA by the four schools, will be funded by a $240,000 grant to begin before October.

The consortium was formed by the schools in 1989, all of which, excluding UTA, have been participants in past NASA robotics research.

"With the interconnected labs and the consortium, we'll be able to take advantage of all the different areas of expertise exhibited by the schools," Carl Adams, NASA project engineer, said. The schools’ areas of expertise include the machine vision and mobile robotics at Rice; manual controllers and modular robot architectures at UT; system architectures and artificial intelligence at A&M; and human performance and workloads at UTA.