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Space Science

The New Canadarm 8

Posted by michael from the stop-poking-me dept.
p3d0 writes: "MacDonald Dettwiler, the company who built the new robotic arm for the International Space Station, has a detailed description of how the new arm works."
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The New Canadarm More

The New Canadarm

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  • LOL! Nicely put.

    But what's wrong with giving credit where it's due?
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  • The arm can attach itself to its supporting structure at both ends, and detach at either end
    That's dandy until someone detaches it at both ends at the same time. Oops.
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  • If it can't get beer. Hosser!
  • I saw a report on BCTV the other night (the software was made in BC). From what I saw, the software seems to use and/or be developed on a Micros~1 operating system. So it looks like our reputation for building reliable rebotic arms now lies in the hands of micros~1. Scary.

    (oh, one cool thing is that they can do software updates remotely. I wonder how long until the arm gets hacked, anyone care to start a pool?)

  • The Russians have the most experience in operating a space station and if you recall they were the first to launch a sattelite and send a man in orbit. Prior before the ISS the last American space station was SkyLab which crashed in 1978.

    America just has put more money in it and it's based on an old scrapped plan for a space station from the Reagan era (which just looked like Mir) and the US politicans don't want any foreigners in charge of it. That is why the US runs it, not because of experience.

  • I am a Canadian, and I am proud of what we have been able to do with this new arm, and what it means for the rest of the world. It's a shame when people get too involved in themselves to see what great science that is going on, and not be able to simply say "Good job."

    The space station is an international project, and it'll help us all in the end. So what is the US has contributed so much so far? I suppose it doesn't matter that they are perhaps the most experience and richest country in the world. I see this as not only a great learning experience, but a greater step towards international freedom and peace. It'll take time... and it will never be perfect, but when have humans been accused of being perfect? It's the work and effort that counts, not necessarily the end project.

  • According to MD Robotics' site, they were also awarded the contract for building the workstation [mdrobotics.ca]. Sadly, the page is lacking in detail. I find the workstation to be the most interesting part of the whole package. Controlling a 17 meter arm with 7 degrees of freedom has to be a very complicated task (although granted the arm will probably generally move very slowly). It makes me wonder what kind of software interface they've got to manage the tremendous amount of information that would go into controlling it (including the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator, which has twice as many degrees of freedom).

    You get a lot more detail in the PDFs at the end of the SPDM page [mdrobotics.ca], in particular, this one [mdrobotics.ca]. It gives you a better sense of scale, as some of the diagrams actually show an astronaut working on installing the device. There's also an interesting closeup of the control panel for the workstation. It appears that the three monitors on the workstation can show input from any of ten cameras. A central knob selects which joint of the SPDM the joystick on the right of the console is controlling. Looks kludgy, but pretty functional. They've also got a series of computer renderings that show the SPDM servicing itself (err... replacing a failed component).

    Apparently MDA [www.mda.ca] will be providing the Operations Control Software, but I can't find any details about it. EMS [ems-t.com] is responsible for the workstation hardware. Also skimpy on details.

    There's some more information on MD Robotics' site about the actual STS-100 mission [mdrobotics.ca].

  • Did some work on a preliminary spdm gui at the CSA(canadian space agency). All the computers in the simulation/training room run Unices. Developped on SGI machines running Solaris and I was cimpiling on one of the bigger machines that also ran solaris. The SSRMS (canadarm) gui is pretty cool. Been a while since I saw it. Actually I was a student there and I'm sure if I pull out my paper on the time I spent there I could find a screenshot of the gui. Dunno if that could get me in trouble though, so I'll keep it to myself.

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