Prepping a robot for its journey to Mars
Sarah Hensley is preparing an astronaut named Valkyrie for a mission to Mars. It is 6 feet tall, weighs 300 pounds, and is equipped with an extended chest cavity that makes it look distinctly female. Hensley spends much of her time this semester analyzing the movements of one of Valkyrie's arms. As a fourth-year electrical engineering student at MIT, Hensley is working with a team of researchers to prepare Valkyrie, a humanoid robot also known as R5, for future space missions. As a teenager in New Jersey, Hensley loved to read in her downtime, particularly Isaac Asimov’s classic robot series. “I’m a huge science fiction nerd — and now I’m actually getting to work with a robot that’s real and not just in books. That’s like, wow.” Hensley is studying Valkyrie for an advanced independent research program, or SuperUROP, as one of only three undergraduate students in the Robot Locomotion Group in...