NASA Space Apps Challenge - Bouncy Ball - Zero G Bee.

NASA Space Apps Challenge in Cambridge over weekend of April 11. See tweets @AlbertPutnam. Many thanks to: Binnovative for heading. Hack/reduce for hosting. IBM for facilitating. Local sponsors for supporting. NASA and ESA overall. Sorry other events and logistics had to share the time.

Looked at doing something with space craft thermal power consumption, but could not find way to data at ESA Venus Express. Seemed like a great place to use some data mining tools from IBM BlueMix.

So instead chatted with people about other ideas, and after awhile came to this Bouncy Ball project for the Zero G Bee challenge.

The Bouncy Ball approach is sort of a hack within a hackathon. Namely a reframing of the problem really: Roadie in space. Social model of robot which needs help. Padded with Zorb.
 

The core work is not about electronics or code, so it made it "difficult" to submit that. But the expression of target intent needs facilitation and that is where a screen module packed inside the ball with the payload would come into play, with input UI using natural language ala Watson, and output UI using facial expressions and language/text like other social robots.

Some one suggested that there would not be enough humans onboard the space station to make social forwarding work... Maybe not. Then the problem could be converted to stewards or doorman bots (arms) at the interconnect points within the station to help the bouncy balls (or anything) along.