A Vancouver man is flying high after being named one of 30 winners of NASA’s Robotic Arm Crowdsourcing Challenge.
Ryan Boyd, 34, beat out more than 33,000 people from all over the world to be selected for the second phase of the challenge.
The end goal of the contest, as the name suggests, is to create a robotic arm for a free-flying robot that will travel aboard the International Space Station.
The first phase of the challenge, the System Architecture Registration contest, consisted of “the process of designing, graphically representing, and putting together a write-up explaining and supporting the structural decomposition of a robotic arm subsystem to be used on a free-flying robot aboard the International Space Station,” Boyd said.
Essentially, contestants broke down the various structures from the station’s robotic arm into the logical parts needed to compose a free-flying version of the instrument. The process took him 10 days to complete.
Boyd and the other 29 winners will now move on to the second phase, Robotic Arm Building, in which participants compete to create the top designs for all the individual components needed to construct the arm.
Boyd is a junior at Oregon State University, majoring in wildlife sciences and sustainability, with a focus on rare and endemic species, astrobiology and geomorphology.
A lover of astronomy from a young age, Boyd said he decided to participate the moment he read the word NASA in an email about the contest from Freelancer.com, a freelancing, outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace. Freelancer is teaming up with NASA to promote this contest.
Freelancer notified Boyd he was one of the 30 winners roughly three weeks after sending in his submission. “I was over the moon with excitement. I’m still thrilled now that my proposal is complete,” Boyd said. “I have always wanted to work with NASA in any capacity and am beyond thankful for this amazing opportunity.”
