Medusa Space Arms

May 7, 2026 · 1 min read
projects

I worked on Medusa as a space-robotics arm testbed, where the physical setup makes coordination visible. The carriage-mounted arm lets us study manipulation and sensing on a system that is not just a fixed industrial arm bolted to the floor; base motion and arm motion both matter.

The project connects mechanical system design, embedded sensing, and control implementation. The useful technical question is how much coordination you can get from a real platform when sensing, actuation limits, and geometry are all present at once. Watch the Medusa Space Arms video demo.

Sources I leaned on: Yoshida’s space robot dynamics work for free-floating manipulation context; Dubowsky and Papadopoulos on planning and control for space manipulators; and standard resolved-rate / operational-space control references for connecting arm motion to task-space behavior.

Keywords: space robotics, robotic arms, manipulation, carriage-mounted testbed, controls, sensing, embedded systems.

Space Robotics Robot Arms Manipulation Controls Sensing Robotics
Henry Kou
Authors
Henry Kou (he/him)
MS Robotics Student and Research Associate
I am an MS Robotics student at Carnegie Mellon University with a background in electrical and computer engineering and a focus on state estimation, control theory, motion planning, and embedded robotic systems. As a research associate in the Biorobotics Lab, I work on building reliable, sensor-driven robots that connect theory with hardware and real-world autonomy.