Taylor Courier, a junior in Computer Engineering, along with his team members has been awarded a team excellence award at the Marshall Space Flight Center during the Intern Poster Expo.  Taylor has spent his  summer conducting robotics research at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, as part of the NASA Robotics Academy.

His work this summer has been sponsored by the NC Space Grant.

Taylor’s team won First Place ($1000) in the Team Excellence category for their project. Entitled "Reconfigurable Computing Telepresence Robot," it involved the creation of a mobile robotic sensor platform for NASA with hardware level data processing capabilities.  They were able to accomplish this by replacing the electronics and control system of a MARCbot, a military IED detection robot, with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based control system. The robotic sensor platform can be controlled from a remote computer which transmits drive commands to the robot and accepts return sensor data.

The other students who participated in the project were:   Ellen Farber, a sophomore at Harvard University in Computer Science; Eric Kurz, a senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Robotics Engineering, and Patrick Scott, who just graduated from Tuskegee University in mechanical engineering.

Taylor has said that he looks forward to getting back to NC State and presenting this research at a school research symposium this Fall.