nasa pick early winner
NASA picks early winners for its ISS robot arm challenge
NASA's bid to crowdsource an arm for its Astrobee cube robot is starting to bear fruit. The agency and Freelancer.com have chosen early winners for the Astrobee Challenges Series, each of which has designed a key component for the robotic appendage. South African grad student Nino Wunderlin produced an attachment mechanism, while Filipino conceptual engineer Myrdal Manzano crafted a "smart" attachment system. Indian software engineer Amit Biswas, in turn, developed a simple deployment mechanism. There's still a ways to go when nine of the contests in the challenge have yet to be unlocked.