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NASA's Astronaut Glove Design Competition
FleaPlus writes "NASA's Centennial Challenges program has announced its latest prize contest, the Astronaut Glove Challenge. The competition, a collaboration between NASA and the non-profit Volanz Aerospace, will be held in late 2006 and will award $250K to the team which produces the best-performing glove within contest parameters. The basic idea was originally proposed last year on Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings blog to improve on current gloves, which have difficulties with remaining flexible while maintaining constant internal pressure in the vacuum of space. Previously-announced competitions include prizes for superstrong tethers, beaming power, and extracting oxygen from lunar regolith. These prizes are intended to lay the groundwork for larger competitions to further NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, possibly including 'an eight-figure prize for the first privately developed robotic moon lander.'"
offtopic maybe but why did they host the pages on tripod rather than on a NASA server? fear of slashdotting ;)
How about designing a really good glove solving all the current issues, patent every aspect of the design to h*ll and back, and then sell the exclusive patent rights to a Chinese conglomerate for at least ten times those $250k?
Hey, if the patent system wasn't meant to be used in that way, it wouldn't have been designed to allow it, right?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Forget gloves...put the arm and hand into a hardened waldo and let a full synthetic appendage do the work.
Having something as fragile as the human hand, inside something as complicated as what is being proposed, isn't a solution.
What I would really be excited about is some competition for a replacement for the shuttle fleet (before you get started, I understand that lots of hard science has gone on in the shuttle missions) so we can get out from the earths shadow. Get people fascinated in space again.
Get a free Ipod!
Lately I'm finding myself enjoying NASA's strategy for developing technology. By rewarding the "discoverer" they get top quality product, for minimal investment and risk of shady contractors. I wish more of our government branches would do this.
Question: is space worth it? I mean, sure, I would love for humans to colonize the solar system, but the vastness of intrasolar distances, the lack of available raw materials, and the cost of moving thing out of Earth's gravity well makes it so... pointless? It's like splurging your life's savings on collecting Pez dispensers...
Speculation: what we're really going to need is a dozen or so decades of advancement in biotech and nanoengineering first. There's no way you're going to turn Moon or Mars into something livable without custom-engineered self-replicating microorganisms churning lifeless dust into organic soil and solving the whole "atmosphere" problem at the same time.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
I agree.. Take a page from Aircraft design like the auto industry. First you have Fly by wire, which spawned Drive by wire... So make a gloves thats grip By Wire.
Like the sibling post says, all you need is to extend the sleeve to cover the whole arm to keep it contained, then have a glove with sensors that can map all the finger joints and provide force feedback..
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
IANA (I am not anything), and I'm not asking this to be a smart-ass. Just want to be clear since the internet can obscure meaning in text. I'm actually curious and this is kind of a basic question the rest of us "not anythings" will want to know.
What are the advantages of putting a human outside the ship rather than a robot with various tools and sensors/cameras?
It seems like this problem of keeping the human alive and capable outside the ship is difficult. How much would we stand to lose by using a robot ball? Some people here are wondering about just shutting off the hand entirely, and just attaching mechanical arms onto the end of the hand encapsulement. Perhaps they could just eschew the human part entirely and just go with arms.
Humans have smell, touch, taste, and sound either cut off or eliminated outside that ship. The body's design isn't really custommade for space, so it'll naturally be inefficient. The hand is an amazing tool, but there's all this trouble keeping it working the same way in space. Perhaps they should just learn from the hand's design and put out a much-simplified adaptation of it onto the robot.
The other big bonus of having a human in space seems to be awareness. The head and eyes are quick and easy to use. But can't you just pivot cameras around, and even zoom them in more effectively than human eyes?
Legs probably don't help that much in space, that's why I'm assuming a ball with jets on it would be how somebody'd cobble together a robot.
I'm guessing it's primarily cost restriction on putting out such a robot into space rather than encasing a human and putting him out right? All that technology rolled into single unit ball for space is going to be difficult to fund.