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The year 2014 has started with many activities for AMM. It has been a year of fresh starts with a new committee of office bearers taking over AMM’s affairs. On behalf of AMM, I thank the previous office bearers particularly the Vice-president Prof. S.K. Saha, IIT Delhi and the Secretary Prof. Sandipan Bandyopadhyay, IIT Madras, who did an excellent job of spearheading the various activities and managing the AMM office over the past few years. AMM also places on record the excellent services of previous Zonal Vice Presidents (ZVP), Dr. Rajesh Sharma, NIT Hamirpur (ZVP North), Dr. K. Panneerselvam, NIT Tiruchirappally (ZVP South), Dr. Subhasis Bhaumik, BESU, Shibpur, Howrah (ZVP East) and Dr. Himanshu Chaudhary, MNIT Jaipur (ZVP West) for managing the editorial affairs of News Bulletin amongst other AMM activities.

The present committee will develop upon the existing activities and start new initiatives so as to expand the reach of AMM. One of the new initiatives currently being purused is to have past NaCoMM conference proceedings indexed with Scopus so that the papers reach a wider audience. Also, to manage the affairs of the AMM’s News Bulletin, a separate post of editor-in chief has been created and AMM welcomes Prof. Santanu Das, Kalyani Govt. Engineering College, Kalyani, West Bengal to this post. The new editorial team constituting of the editor-in-chief and the four newly nominated ZVPs have already started their activities. We must thank Dr. R. Ranganath, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore (ZVP South) for taking lead to come up with this second quarterly issue for the year 2014.

AMM members are requested to contribute articles and can write to the editorial team in this regard. This year also started with one of our regular AMM conferences, IPRoMM, that was held at the ITS Engineering College Greater Noida. The AMM official website at URL: www.ammindia.org, will see some changes. It has been planned to make additional AMM forms such as membership update form and documents available online so as to benefit present and prospective members. The new membership process is online and in order to make it completely paper less, we indent to move from DD / Cheque based money transfer to online money transfer accompanied by an email.

On behalf of AMM and myself, I thank you very much for your continued support and wish you a very professionally fulfilling year ahead!

Dr. G Saravana Kumar

Secretary

From the Secretary’s Desk

3

AMM headquarters are currently located at the Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras. A new set of office bearers have taken charge of the affairs of AMM. AMM invites both individual and corporate membership from Indian academia, research organizations and industry. Membership benefits and other information about AMM are available at www.ammindia.org. The body of Zonal Vice Presidents (ZVPs) is active over the past several years with representations from the four corners of the country. They are playing the role of nodal agencies so as to decentralise the AMM official activities and to organise workshops under the aegis of AMM to popularise the mechanism science in their respective regions. They also form the editorial team of this news bulletin. AMM invites contributory articles from its members and others working in the various fields of mechanisms science for this quarterly news bulletin. Interested people can contact the editorial team.

Office Bearers of the AMM: Prof. C. Amarnath (President) Retired Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, INDIA Phone: + 91 80 2368 2151 Email: president@ammindia.org

Prof. Ashitava Ghosal (Vice President) Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, INDIA. Phone: +91 80 2293 2956 Email: vicepresident@ammindia.org Web:http://www.mecheng.iisc.ernet.in/~asitava

Dr. G. Saravana Kumar (Secretary) Department of Engineering Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai 600036, INDIA. Phone: + 91 (44) 2257 4736 Email: secretary@ammindia.org Web: http://ed.iitm.ac.in/~gsaravana

Dr. Palaniappan Ramu (Treasurer) Department of Engineering Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai 600036, INDIA. Phone: + 91 (44) 2257 4738 Email: treasurer@ammindia.org Web: http://ed.iitm.ac.in/~palramu

About the Association of Machines and Mechanisms (AMM)

4

Editorial Team of the News Bulletin: Dr. Santanu Das (Editor-in-Chief, News Bulletin) Professor and Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering Kalyani Govt. Engineering College, Kalyani- 741235, INDIA Phone: +91 (33) 2582 1309 Email: sdas.me@gmail.com Dr. Shankar Sehgal, (Zonal Vice President [ZVP] North) Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department, Room No. 102, Block 2, U.I.E.T., Sector-25 Panjab University, Chandigarh- 160 014. INDIA Phone: +91 95010 24161 E-mail: shankarsehgal@yahoo.com Dr. R. Ranganath, (ZVP, South) Spacecraft Mechanisms Group, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore-560017, INDIA Phone: +91 (80) 25082417 Email: rrrr@isac.gov.in

Dr. Ranjit Kumar Barai, (ZVP, East) Associate Professor, Control System Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata- 700 032, INDIA Phone: +91 (33) 24139270 Email: ranjit.k.barai@gmail.com Dr. Shital S. Chiddarwar (ZVP, West) Assistant Professor, Dept of Mechanical Engineering Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, INDIA Phone: +91 9561050130 Email: shitalsc@mec.vnit.ac.in

5

Space Robotics: A Brief Overview Abhinandan Kapoor1 and R. Ranganath2

Spacecraft Mechanisms Group, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore Email: 1akapoor@isac.gov.in, 2 rrrr@isac.gov.in

1. Introduction Space Robotics1 is the development of general purpose machines that are capable of surviving the rigors of the space environment and performing exploration, assembly, construction, maintenance, servicing or other tasks. Space Robots are generally designed to do multiple tasks, including unanticipated ones like payload deployment, retrieval, inspections and planetary exploration.

Space robotics has shown immense potential in the recent years due to comparatively lower cost and lower risk factors to manned missions. In addition, it has supported several on-orbit operations to astronauts on-board thus cementing its importance.

Space robotics technology has bifurcated into two main areas: Orbital robotics and planetary rovers. Orbital robotics encompasses manipulation and mobility associated with in orbit satellite servicing. Planetary robotics has the focus on explorations on the surface of the moon and Mars by means of surface mobile robots. By and large, planetary robotics also encompasses explorations on asteroids and comets.

The space environment is hazardous which is characterised by microgravity, radiation, thermal extremes, very high vacuum etc. This provides unique challenges to the robot and robot algorithms in orbital robotics domain. Also issues like electromechanical design and control, locomotion in micro gravity, machine vision related to assembly and inspection combined with disturbing aspects like glare, glint and deep shadows, power and recharging process, radiation hardening, thermal aspects etc. have a major influence in the design of the orbital robots which have to be carefully addressed2.

For the planetary rovers, in addition to many of the issues of orbital rovers, the surface environment of the planet under exploration poses unique challenges. The transport of the rover to the surface of the planet with or without any atmosphere and the uncertainty of interacting with an unexplored natural terrain are some of the key challenges.

Today, two important devices exist which are proven space robots. One is the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and the other is the Remote Manipulator System (RMS). An ROV can be an unmanned spacecraft that remains in flight, a lander that makes contact with an extraterrestrial body and operates from a stationary position, or a rover that can move over terrain once it has landed. It is difficult to say exactly when early spacecraft evolved from simple automatons to robot explorers or ROVs. Even the earliest and simplest spacecraft operated with some pre-programmed functions monitored closely from Earth. One of the best known ROV's is the Sojourner rover (Figure 1) that was deployed by the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. Presently, several Space agencies are involved in developing planetary explorers and space-based robots.

The most common type of existing robotic device is the robot arm often used in industry and manufacturing. The mechanical arm recreates many of the movements of the human arm, having not only side-to-side and up-and-down motion, but also a full 360-degree circular motion at the wrist, which humans do not have. Robot arms are of two types. One is computer-operated and programmed for a specific function. The other requires a human to actually control the strength and movement of the arm to perform the task. To date, the

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Name of the Mission

Year Robot Configuration Functions

Mars Surveyor

2001 DOF: 4 Reach :2m radius sphere Mass : 5 kg End Effector: sampling scoop, scraping blades, electrometer and a crowfoot for deployment of rover.

Dig and access depths of up to 50 cm.

Robotic Arm camera for continuous imagery and observation of the landing site and surroundings.

Rocky 7 Prototype, precursor to Mars Exploration Rover (MER)

DOF : 2 Length: 32 cm, Mass :650 g End Effector: Sampler, Spectrometer

Sample Digging, dumping and acquiring data for spectrometer.

Mars Exploration Rovers –Spirit and Opportunity

2003 DOF: 5 Reach: 90 cm Rock Abrasion Tool :<720 g End Effector: Instrument Module

Hold and manoeuvre the scientific instruments to the required positions with respect to rock and soil for analyses5.

Mars Phoenix

2007 DOF: 4 Length :2.35 m End Effector: Sampling scoop, spectrometer

Digging trenches, acquiring water -ice samples and transferring it to the on-board labs for detailed analyses.

Mars Science Laboratory

2009 DOF : 5 Length : 6 feet End Effector : Surface sampler, Instrument module

Placing science instruments in contact with Martian surface

Collecting samples by digging the soil and drilling rocks.

ExoMars 2011 DOF: 5 End Effector: Corer/grinder tool, spectrometer, instrument module

Positioning of instruments against rocks, target surfaces for retrieval of samples.

4. Conclusion

In this article, the domain of space robotics, its challenges and utility have been addressed. The salient aspects of a few space robots have been illustrated. A brief summary of various planetary robots and robots used for berthing operations in space have been tabulated along with references.

References

[1] B. Wilcox, R. Ambrose and V. Kumar, Space Robotics, www.wtec.org/robotics/report /03-space.pdf, 2006.

[2] Space Robotics– IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, www.ieee-ras.org/space-robotics.

[3] www.airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/expolringg-the-planets/online/tools/img/ sojourner.jpg

[4] www.canadaarm1et2.blogspot.in/2012/09/canadarm-2.html [5] www.ieee.ca/millenium/canadarm/canadarm-technical.html

11

[6] Structure of Canada Arm- Canada Space Agency, www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/canadarm/ description.asp, 2011.

[7] M. Oda, K. Kibe, F. Yamagala, ETS-VII, Space Robot in Orbit Experiment Satellite, NASDA, Japan, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 1996.

[8] www.astro.mech.tohoku.ac.jp/~yoshida/ETS-VII/ [9] https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/e/ets-vii [10] www.esmats.eu/esmatspapers/pastpapers/pdfs/2011/billing.pdf [11] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Mars_Science_Laboratory [12] E.T. Baumgartner, R.G. Bonitz, J.P. Melko, L.R. Shiraishi and P.C. Leger, The Mars

Exploration Rover Instrument Positioning System, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, March 2005.

[13] M. Dettwiler, Space and Advanced Robotics Ltd., www.mdacorporation.com.

Table 2: Summary of Various Berthing Missions

Name of the Mission

Year Robot Configuration Functions

ETS-7-Orbital Rendezvous & Robotic Mission(JAXA)

1997 Robotic arm Length: 2m DOF: 6, Mass of Robot= 45kg Payload capacity: 400 kg

Capturing & berthing of a target satellite

Assembly Deploy & retrieve a

space structure Orbital Express 2007 Robotic arm Length :3m

DOF: 6, Mass= 71kg Payload capacity: 250 kg

Free-fly capture Component

replacement Propellant transfer

Dextrous Robotic arm(ESA)13

Under develop-ment

Robotic arm Length :1m DOF: 7, Mass= 20kg Payload capacity: 500 kg

Servicing of space station platforms

JEM Remote manipulator system(JAXA)

2008 Robotic arm Length:10m DOF: 6, Mass = 20kg Payload capacity: 7000 kg

Handling & assembling payloads

Capturing & berthing operations

European Robotic arm(ERA)

2012 Robotic arm Length:11m DOF: 7, Mass = 630kg Payload capacity: 8000 kg

Installation & deployment of solar arrays

Handling of P/L Support of astronauts

during space walks SSRMS(Canada Arm-2)

2001 Robotic arm Length :17m DOF: 7, Mass= 1800kg Payload capacity: 116000 kg design load

Station assembly & maintenance

Support of astronauts during space walks

SRMS(Canada Arm-1)

1981 Robotic arm Length: 15m DOF: 6, Mass= 410kg Payload capacity: 29484 kg design load

Capture stationary or free flying P/L

Station assembly & maintenance

12

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ician). Hismatics at an blems at he

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next. He ation for thnical Engineeceiving puted the M.T

en 1961 andy & Boyce. h in the arer 11, 1963ion.

gust 1966, h. Their firs

ducted his ree well wi

Kanpur to pfrom IIT-Mle of his Phon Generatiotics, was on

sion, and lane for being a

to Profe

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er grade lev. His handwematics couboard with bnt equations

his schoolinown, for his

He was initiabecome a mook up mat

was seleche Indian Ineering in 19urely merit

Tech program

d 1963, he At this timea. He join

3 as a lect

he marriest son, Eswa

doctoral reithin the stipperform the

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essor K.

AssocilecturelecturebienniaMechawork opreparit andworkincapstoTechnoKurien

rn on OctobBhimeswarawas K. ROccasional

vel. Anothewriting wasurse much lbeautiful lins and text.

ng as the tops Intermediaally enrolled

medical doctthematics incted in 195nstitute of T959 from IITt-based schmme in Me

e worked inme, he devened the Meturer. He

ed Rajyalakar, was born

search duripulated tim

e computer August 1969was “Synthesor F. Freuesis examin

ed in the thedoctorate any

Lakshm

ation for Me in the nae is deliveal Nation

anisms. In thof Prof. Lakred by his s

d added a lng with Proone designology, Madn Isaac.

ber 12th, 193a Rao, was

Ratnamanikylly, he wouler talent hes beautiful ilater in his ne drawings

p-ranked stuate (11th andd in a biolotor. Howevnstead. It w55 for admTechnologyT, Kharagpuholarships. echanical En

n Bombay eloped an i

echanical Entook up h

kshmi, whn in 1967, a

ng this timme. In Septe

work need. Professoresis of Plan

udenstein, wners. Freudesis were aywhere in t

minaray

Machines andame of Profered by annal Confehis brief artkshminarayon, Dr. Eswlittle basedof. Lakshmi project

dras, Chenn

38, in Tenas a physicyamma. Hld help his s had was inin both Englife, will v

s of linkage

udent at thed 12th standgy course fver, after a

was natural mission thr (IIT). He rur. He was

He continngineering i

as a Designterest in mngineering

his teaching

ho hailed fand the seco

e and compember or Ocded for his tr R. G. Narne Lower P

who is considenstein hadll at such ahe world.

yana (1

d Mechanisof. K. Lakshn eminent erence on ticle, we remyana. Much war Kallurid on my owinaraya on at the Inai, and with

ali, a town iian (generae displayesister, oldern drawing bglish and Tevouch for ths and would

e local highdard) studiesfollowing hishort whilefor him to ough the freceived hione of only

nued at IITin 1960.

gn Engineermechanismsdepartment

g work wit

from Vijayond son, Sud

pleted all thctober 1968thesis. He ayana Murt

Pair Mechanidered as thd noted thata high level

938-199

sms has a mhminarayanresearcher

Machinemember the of the cont

. I have onlwn recollec

my undergndian Instih inputs fro

in Andhra Pal practitio

ed an affinr by two yeabotanical anelugu. His shis fact. Hed compleme

h school, he s, with an eis father's de, the mismapursue engfirst ever es B.Tech dy six studenT, Kharagp

r at Dynacrs and wantet at IIT-Math enthusia

yawada in dhakar, in 1

he requirem8, he spent received th

thi was the nisms for Bhe father of t the subjectl that the w

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memorial na. This r at the es and life and tent was ly edited ctions of graduate itute of om Prof.

Pradesh, ner and nity for ars, with nd other students, e would ent them

went to mphasis esire for atch was ineering entrance egree in

nts in his pur and

raft and ed to do adras on asm and

Andhra 968.

ments for a month

he Ph.D. adviser.

Bivariate f modern t matter,

work was

13

He spent nearly two years from late 1969 on a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship at Braunschweig in the erstwhile West Germany. His family joined him for some part of this stay. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1970 while he was still in Germany.

As his sons were growing up, he stimulated their interest in mathematics and mechanics. He devised novel methods of speed arithmetic, trigonometry proofs, and intuitive explanations of calculus concepts. Over the years, there were many more such results of creative thinking on his part.

He visited at Braunschweig again in the academic year 1976-77, this time on an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation scholarship. He did his celebrated work on form closure in mechanisms during this time. His paper entitled “Mechanics of Form Closure” (ASME Paper 78-DET-32, 1978) has become a classic cited a few hundred times with a most recent citation in 2011. In August 1980, he was promoted to Professor.

He and his students conducted research in the area of mechanisms at the Machine Elements laboratory in IIT, Madras. He taught many courses at the B.Tech, M.Tech, and Ph.D. levels. Students revered his courses. Students found his courses tough because his standards of teaching were very high. Those who learnt kinematics from him were empowered with the correct way of thinking about the subject. His judiciously mixed intuition and rigour in his teaching. Much of the material he taught in his “Mechanisms and Transmissions” course at IIT-Madras cannot be found in most modern texts. His derivations were insightful. Such basic concepts as Kutzbach-Grübler’s formula and Grashof criterion became profound because of the manner he taught them. His treatment of epicyclic gear trains and their input output torque relation considering friction, synthesis of Geneva wheel-based indexing device, and star wheels were original.

His approach to synthesis of mechanism was unparalleled. He combined his deep understanding of geometry with keen analytical skills to come up with straightforward synthesis procedures. One example is the synthesis of cam-operated mechanisms in which a cam is the output member and the roller-crank is the driving member. He devised ingenious methods in which the limits of transmission angle can be discerned while satisfying arbitrary motion specifications including indexing, multiple swells and reversal of motion.

His laboratory in IIT, Madras had a precious collection of mechanism models. He encouraged his students to build models. Those who worked with him know that he had thorough understanding of practical aspects of making prototypes and their implications in eventual manufacturing. His interests were not confined to kinematics. He was interested in machine design as a whole. He translated Niemann's book on Machine Elements Design into English, along with some of his colleagues.

His inspiring research career ended abruptly while he was still in service. He passed away on April 13, 1997 in Madras after a massive heart attack. His wife, K. Rajyalakshmi, continues to reside in Madras, in an area called Velachery, adjacent to the IIT campus. The older son, Dr. Kalluri Eswar, is a Software Engineer at Google, in Mountain View, California. The younger son, Dr. Sudhakar Kalluri, is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Ikanos Communications, in Fremont, California.

G. K. Ananthasuresh

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

14

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