This Graduate Student Equips NASA’s Robots With Assembly Skills

Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016.Watching PBS specials on NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and seeing the live broadcast of the Curiosity rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA.Sarah DownsMEMBER GRADEGraduate student memberUNIVERSITY Texas A&M University in College StationMAJOR Electric engineeringThis year the IEEE graduate student member achieved that dream. For her final project as a master’s degree candidate in electrical engineering at the University of Tulsa, she worked on an algorithm in collaboration with NASA and the U.S. Air Force.The algorithm she developed enables a robot assembling satellites in space to insert an antenna into the correct spot, addressing robotics’s classic peg-in-hole problem of inserting an object into its corresponding hole.Now a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Downs is continuing her research on satellite assembly and manipulation “but on a much larger scale,” she says.Following a childhood passionDowns grew up in the Tulsa area. Her father, who died from a heart attack in 2015 when she was 13, was a safety advisor in the oil and gas industry. Her mother stayed home to take care of her brother, who has autism. After her father died, her mother went back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in business so she could support the family.“We didn’t have much income, and my mom was always worried about money,” Downs says. “That made me more aware of having a successful career, in a monetary sense.”From then on, whenever she considered her future career, having a decent salary to support the family was high on her list.By pursuing a career in robotics, she says, she can follow her passion while obtaining financial security.In high school, Downs joined the First robotics club, where she found herself drawn to the electrical components used in the machines she and her classmates built.During her final two years of high school, she participated in an extension program at Tulsa Tech, a training school. She spent half her day in high school classes and the other half taking engineering courses at the vocational school.After graduating in 2020, she accepted scholarships to attend the University of Tulsa. She began her freshman year at UTulsa not knowing whether she wanted to major in electrical or mechanical engineering, she says, adding that her love of working with small systems helped her choose EE.For her senior year capstone project, she and two of her classmates designed a lunar lander exhibit for the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. They created an interactive game that simulates missions on lunar and martian surfaces. Four celestial bodies—the moon, Venus, Mars, and Titan—are listed across three computer monitors. Using a game controller, museum visitors can explore the virtual surface of each one. The exhibit is still on display.Downs earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2024 and continued her education at the university’s EE master’s degree program.Both more and less complicated than people thinkWhen Downs began her graduate studies, she was supposed to be part of a NASA robotics project for two years. But when a delay in government funding postponed the project’s start, she instead spent her first year in the school’s Institute for Robotics and Autonomy, then newly launched. Its main focus is developing robots to assist people who have mobility challenges.Inspired by her grandmother, who was wheelchair-bound due to severe arthritis, Downs developed a robotic arm that helps older people and wheelchair users live independently. The arm was able to identify and place objects in the appropriate locations inside the home, such as unloading certain groceries from a shopping bag and placing them on a shelf or in separate containers.Before the start of her sophomore year in 2025, the NASA project finally secured government funding. She developed a robot that achieves the peg-in-hole task without using any vision systems. Typically, cameras help guide robots’ satellite-assembly work. But in the harsh, remote environment of outer space, cameras might malfunction or encounter delays.“Don’t stop asking questions. Especially in engineering, don’t pretend like you know everything, because science is about constantly wanting to learn and listen.”Rather than using cameras, Downs’s robotic arm deploys a force-based insertion process to sense position and orientation of objects in the arm’s environment. The robot loosely grips an antenna and, with a torque sensor on its gripper, “feels” the force feedback of where the satellite and antenna are in relation to each other. The robot then guid