Alice Agogino and her Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities (BEST) Lab from UC Berkeley demonstrated their rapid prototyped tensegrity robots for Dr. Dava Newman, the newly minted Deputy Administrator of NASA on Friday July 17. Feature photo above caption: Prof. Agogino with Dr. Newman (center), with undergraduate researcher Kimberley Fountain (from Berkeley Community College, left) and Kyle Zampaglione (MS student, right) next to two of our robot prototypes. See more images in our photo album or view our video of the event.

Working with the Intelligent Robotics Systems group at NASA Ames (Terry Fong, Adrian Agogino and Vytas Sunspiral and students from UCSD and UCSC), the demonstration took place at the Roverscape at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Terry Fong (left, Director of the Intelligent Robotics Group, NASA Ames), Kyunam Kim (UC Berkeley doctoral student),  Dava Newman (center), with Vytas SunSpiral (right, Senior Robotics Researcher, NASA Ames)	UC Berkeley tensegrity prototpyes with Ali Toghyan, Kevin Li, Kyle Zampaglione, Kimberley Fountain, Alice Agogino (left) with NASA Ames’ SUPERball bot and NASA Ames’ researchers Vytas SunSpiral and Adrian Agogino (right).

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We were joined by the new Director of NASA Ames Eugene Tu, who received his BS in ME at UC Berkeley in 1988.

The demonstration took place at NASA Ames’ Roverscape, a mock moon/mars landscape for testing rovers (left to right, Alice Agogino, Kimberley Fountain, Kyle Zampaglione, Kyunam Kim, Kevin Li).

This research was partially supported by a NASA Early Stage Innovations (ESI) research grant titled: Precision Hopping/Rolling Robotic Surface Probe Based on Tensegrity Structures.

Feature photo caption: Prof. Agogino with Dr. Newman (center), with undergraduate researcher Kimberley Fountain (from Berkeley Community College, left) and Kyle Zampaglione (MS student, right) next to two of our robot prototypes .