NASA Internship

This past fall term I had the opportunity to complete an internship with NASA at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The internship was 4 months long from August to December. I worked in a VR lab developing an immersive training simulation for the Atermis III mission. I learned a lot about software development and got to work with expensive and high-end technology systems. Overall, the internship was an extremely rewarding experience.

Projects

During my internship, I worked on two major projects. The first, was the ‘Forward Access Study on the IHab Gateway Module’ and the second was the ‘Collaborative Training Simulation’. The Forward Access study was for a paying client engineering group interested in studying different methods for processing payloads. While the Collaborative Training Simulation was a general long term project seeking to provide NASA with a common set of technologies capable of immersive training for technicians, who are responsible for working with flight hardware.

Forward Access Study

At the start of my internship an outside engineering group, Advance Planning, commissioned our lab to conduct a humans factors study. They were interested in studying different methods for processing payloads that will go on future Artemis missions. A major engineering challenge at NASA is that operation procedures often need to be developed before the actual hardware is available or even onsite. This often leads to costly unforeseen challenges. The clients were mainly concerned with technicians ability to perform certain operations when given different tools and machinery.
I had numerous responsibilities in planning and conducting the study. I, along with the other intern, were primarily responsible for running the motion capture system on the day of the study. The Vicon motion capture volume, provides accurate full-body motion tracking capabilities, which are crucial for conducting human factors analysis during the study. Additionally, we developed the physical mock-ups that provided the technicians with tactile objects to interact with during the study. We utilized rapid prototyping and 3D printing to build the mock-ups. The simulation ran in Unreal Engine 4.27, a real-time gaming engine. We were given 3D CAD models by the clients and were responsible to for converting those to real-time gaming assets, which have strict authoring requirements. We did a lot of asset authoring in Blender 3D to create needed UV and texture maps.

Me in the full-body motion capture suit preforming a test for the Forward Access Study.

Collaborative Training Simulation

This was our main project through out the term. We, the other intern and I, were tasked with developing new features for the Collaborative Training Simulation program. This a software program developed in Unreal Engine 5 that allows multiple users across different NASA centers explore processing facilities in VR and practice operations in a realistic virtual setting. We developed two new features ‘controllerless object interaction’, which allows users to pick up virtual objects without hand controllers and full-body tracking with Vive hardware, which a new way for users to interact with the virtual world using smaller more cost effective hardware.

I am most proud of the full-body tracking system, because this turned out to be fairly complicated to implement. The main complication is that it required the development of a skeletal rig capable for transforming hardware tracking data into character animation. The hardware trackers only provide positional and rotational data; they only tell you where they are in space. I developed a software system that took this spatial data and inferred skeletal positioning ie. how the arms bend, the chest rotates, and where the head points. It took me about 2 months to develop this system, and I had to learn about numerous Unreal Engine tools in the process. In the end, I got a working and system and we tested it with Marshall Space Flight Center. It was extremely rewarding to see other engineers using the system I developed, and they seemed really pleased with it.

At the end of our internship we presented our progress to our chief during a branch meeting and received a lot of positive feedback. Unfortunately, as is the case with any software project, there is still a lot that could be worked on, and we left a task list. Hopefully, the future interns are able to take up our project and develop the features we didn’t have time to get to.

Conclusion

One of the best parts of my internship experience were the people I met. I got to meet engineers from every type of disciple. Everyone at NASA was extremely open to talking about their work and were willing to share their time explaining their work in detail. Additionally, the other interns were all passionate and skilled. I enjoyed learning about their work during our weekly meetings. The people around me motivated and inspired me to learn and improve my skills. Everyday felt like a little adventure in which I got solve challenging problems. The experience has definitely deepen my passion for computer science and my general interest in engineering.

Intern group picture on our last day