All Aboard for Cassidy and Crewmates on This Week @NASA

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All Aboard for Cassidy and Crewmates on This Week @NASA - Video

GLASTONBURY, Conn., April 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --TopCoder, Inc., the world's largest open innovation platform and competitive community of 470,000 digital creators, today announced two new marathon competitions hosted through the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) that will look to continue delivery of output-based high value returns in the most cost-effective and measurable software development process currently available to government agencies. The competitions will center on NASA's famous space robot Robonaut 2 aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The initial challenge will focus on enabling Robonaut 2 to interact visually with different types of input devices the astronauts use on the Space Station.

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Successfully completed projects for NASA on NTL's open and transparent environment for sophisticated technology development include the recent Longeron Shadowing Optimization Challenge, a $30,000 open innovation competition to make the energy-gathering solar arrays of the Space Station more efficient which attracted a pool of more than 4,000 registrants and delivered 459 competitors who produced 2185 unique solutions in less than two weeks, the Space Med Kit competition which delivered a 360 x improvement over the existing NASA algorithm and garnered 2,833 distinct code submissions from 1,095 participants at a cost of $24,000, and thePlanetary Data System Idea Challenge, an open innovationchallenge in deployment and future use mode which found novel ideas for new applications to help general users to search, display and understand the more than 100 terabytes of recorded space images, telemetry and models from 30 years of planetary missions. Additionally, the Food Intake Tracker (FIT) iPad App Conceptualization and Voice Command Idea Generation competitions recently finished with architecture competitions beginning soon. The ISS-FIT competition program is creating new dietary tracking applications for use by astronauts.

"We at TopCoder are thrilled to be again working with Harvard and NASA to provide creative and inventive support of NTL's mission todeliver critical solutions while recognizing the need to return high taxpayer value," said Rob Hughes, President and COO of TopCoder, Inc. "We feel that our collective efforts on Robonaut 2, along with our successful Longeron, PDS and FIT programs have exposed the exciting prospect that game changing solutions can be created at reasonable cost by a new generation of engineers, programmers and technologists which is critical to innovation in the public sector and beyond."

About the Robonaut 2 CompetitionsCompetitors from around the world are welcome to register at http://community.topcoder.com/longcontest/?module=ViewActiveContests . Each phase will run three weeks from start to finish.

This first phase of the two competitions is to enable Robonaut 2 to recognize the state and location of several buttons and switches on a dashboard fitted with LED lights. Contestants will be tasked to work with different sets of imagery from NASA's lab on earth and on the Space Station, as well as in a simulator. The successful algorithm application must work with each of several different camera systems and varying lighting conditions within each environment.

A second contest will ask competitors to use the "seeing" algorithm produced in the first challenge in order to write an algorithm that actually controls the robot's motion. The algorithm will need to "see" an object, recognize it, and correctly operate and interact with it in the most efficient and safe manner possible.

A long term goal is to further develop the capabilities of robots to interact with input devices and move closer to enabling them to one day perform repetitive, monotonous tasks in place of astronauts. Full details are available at http://www.topcoder.com/iss/robonaut/.

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TopCoder and NASA Tournament Lab Champion High Value Output-Based Challenges, Now Look to Bring Sight Capability to ...

Yannick LeJacq , NBC News contributor 4 hrs.

You are the space invaders, NASA manager Jeff Norris declared last week to a packed audience at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

It was a dramatic ending to a surprise talk scheduled at the last minute into a conference usually packed with the most arcane and theoretical pieces of trade information game developers swap with one another over a week at San Franciscos Moscone Convention Center. Gamers and developers alike may have been confused to see real-world space exploration suddenly creep into a flurry of conversations about virtual worlds, but, as Norris explained during his presentation, NASAs projects have often overlapped with the work of game designers.

To start, theres the hallowed ground of the living room, where viewers first witnessed the legendary Apollo 11 landing, which Norris said was the most watched television broadcast at the time in history.

The living room is a place we'd like to be again, Norris said.

While the aerospace organization may still be working on its giant leap into peoples consoles, NASA has already made its way back to the living room with a series of small steps. Last June, NASA released the Kinect-based game Mars Rover Landing in collaboration with Microsofts Xbox 360 team to give players a chance to control the Curiosity rover during its precipitous landing on the surface of the red planetwhich was, uncharacteristically for video games, not peopled with tons of scary Martians, demons, and gateways to hell for once (Sorry, id.)

Norris acknowledged the Mars Rover Landing game along with a small handful of other interactive initiatives that NASA has attempted in the past. But for the future of space exploration, NASA is thinking bigger than a standalone Kinect game. Indeed, Norris and his colleague Victor Luo, a NASA human interface engineer, said that NASA is now working with game controller developers like Microsoft and Leap Motion to come up with new ways to control robots of all shapes and sizes.

Norris and Luo showed GDC a few early prototypes for this new technology, remotely controlling a massive six-limbed spider-like robot referred to as ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer, we have a weird fetish for acronyms, they joked) with the palm of one of Luos hands as footage was live-streamed to the conference through a Google Hangout.

The two admitted that the current examples were more simulations than video games per se, calling them part game, part not game. But Luo joked that the thought of moving a one-ton robot with my hand was probably every gamer geek space fan boys dream. This quasi-gameplay was the cool stuff, the hardcore gameplay, the stuff that made us NASAand, therefore, the stuff that NASA was hoping would reignite our curiosity for government-funded space exploration.

But Norris and Luo didnt stop there. Instead, they laid out a bold and science fiction-drenched vision for the future of NASA and space exploration more generally.

Originally posted here:

How NASA wants to use video games to make us all ‘Space Invaders’

Laura Woodmansee is a writer based in Southern California. She holds an M.S. in Journalism from USCs Annenberg School for Journalism and is the author of the books "Women Astronauts," "Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier," and "Sex in Space." She contributed this piece to LiveSciences Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

By now, I hope youve heard that NASA has put into suspended animation many of its educational and non-media public outreach, including their STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educationprograms. This is until it can review all of those programs.

It sounds like an April Fools' Day joke, doesnt it? Believe me, its real. If you hadnt heard about all this, its probably because the various news media havent covered it much. It seems to me that the American people (and the world) ought to know what's happening.

I understand that NASA was forced to make some cuts in order to abide by the sequester. But, Id never have thought our space agency would even consider pausing or deleting so much of something so important to the future of NASA and of the United States as education and outreach.

I hope that these cuts are temporary, a way to force Congress into repealing the sequester for NASA. If it's not, and these cuts are made permanent, the world will lose something special that NASA magic. [Petition Asks White House to Reverse NASA Outreach Sequester Cuts]

If you think this doesnt affect you, think again. NASAs educational and public outreach programs are the key to letting the public know about space science. What comes out of those programs inspires a whole new generation of scientists and engineers, and even artists and writers like myself. By cutting education and public outreach, NASA is shooting itself in the foot.NASA outreach works hard to let the public know just what the space agency does without information, what public interest there is in NASA will fade away.

NASA outreach also inspires kids each year via thousands of school events, conferences, tours, robot tournaments and other fun educational activities. By cutting outreach, NASA risks being responsible for millions of kids and adults not being interested in science, technology, engineering and math. What inspired at least two generations of Americans and others worldwide will be gone. Will kids be aware of what is going on in space science? Probably not. There will be no cool space cards handed out at school by a NASA scientist, engineer or astronaut; no science experiment fun sheets courtesy of NASA outreach and STEM programs. In the long term, if fewer people are interested in space science, there may be no space program at all.

Cutting back, or even halting, NASAs educational outreach programs amounts to sacrificing the future for a bit of a financial break today. It is the scourge of our times. In the United States, optimism for the future used to be our defining characteristic.At one time, NASA embodied the future. Now, we are stuck in the present and unable to imagine a future where economics will again seem, well, good.

So the sequester is hitting NASA hard, at its heart. Sure, some education and outreach programs have been added to the exempted list, and the situation doesnt look quite as bleak as it did when the memo first came out on March 22. But, many good programs are still in danger.

You may think "what can I do?" I suggest you share this news, or this article, with your friends, family and acquaintances who have any sort of interest in space, engineering or technology. You can also contact your congressional representative. With enough people contacting the NASA directors office and congressional representatives, then perhaps we can change things for the better.

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Lack of NASA Outreach Is a Setback to US Science

A NASA video announcement highlighting the agency's space exploration efforts could be coming to a theater near you when the next "Star Trek" film warps onto the big screen in May.

The Aerospace Industries Association, a private organization that represents more than 350 manufacturers involved in spaceflight, has raised more than $42,000 to help place a NASA advertisement in 59 movie theaters for eight weeks across the U.S. The NASA video ad will run before "Star Trek Into Darkness" the next chapter in the rebooted "Star Trek" franchise when it debuts on May 17.

After setting up a campaign on the crowdfunding website IndieGoGo.com on March 26, officials from the AIA met their initial $33,000 goal in six days with the help of more than 1,000 backers.

"By backing this 30-second trailer in the top movie theater markets around the United States, you can show our students and young people that we're in an exciting new era of space exploration," officials from the AIA wrote on the campaign page. "Now is the time to reach them to remind them that an inspiring space program awaits, one that is worthy of their ambition." [See Photos of the "Star Trek Into Darkness"]

The 30-second spot will be a cut-down version of a 2.5 minute video called "We are the Explorers" produced by NASA last year. Narrated by Peter Cullen the voice of Optimus Prime in the "Transformers" movie series the video details the past and possible future of the space agency.

"Right now men and women are working on the next steps to go farther than we have ever gone before," Cullen said in his narration. "New vessels will carry us, and new destinations await us."

This campaign comes on the heels of a March 22 announcement that NASA outreach activities will be scaled back because of sequestration. Due to the series of across-the-board budget cuts, NASA officials have suspended many of the agency's public outreach programs in place to get children and adults involved in the space program.

The AIA seems to be trying to pick up where NASA left off. Officials with the space agency are not legally allowed to use NASA funds to buy advertisement time, but the AIA, as a private organization, is under no such obligation.

"By funding this campaign, we can remind students and the general public that our nation's space agency is working hard on the next era of exploration," AIA officials wrote in the campaign statement. "Keeping the public informed of NASA's activities is a key element of sustaining the health of our space program."

While the campaign has met its initial goal, AIA officials have set a new funding goal they hope to reach before the end of the month. If the campaign raises $94,000 or more, the NASA advertisement will be placed in 750 theaters in the U.S.

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Next 'Star Trek' Film Gets NASA Video Trailer In Crowdfunding Project