AERcam

AERcam (Nasa's New Toy) (Now, this is a camera I bet we would all like to get our hands on, a free floating, voice activated camera. There is no need to leave home anymore. But no computer will ever replace the cameraman's eye, we like to hope) Objectives: The Autonomous EVA Robotic Camera (AERCam) is being developed to perform visual and non-visual inspection activities around orbiting parent spacecraft. The ultimate goal is to have a …

…the operator will be managed by a multi-tiered control architecture. This architecture uses the lower two layers of the 3-Tier (3T) Intelligent Software Architecture. The skills implemented in AERCam II include trajectory movement, discrete movement, station-keeping, teleoperation, obstacle avoidance, landmark recognition, and visual inspection. Guidance and navigation will be performed using a combination of a Differential Carrier Phase Global Positioning System (DCP GPS), an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and computer vision techniques. courtesy of NASA