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 Downs MEMBER GRADE Graduate student member UNIVERSITY Texas A&M University in College Station MAJOR Electric engineering This 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 passion Downs 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 think When 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 guides the antenna assembly into a target opening on its satellite and maintains the position during adhesion. Adding to the complexity, the robot performs its task in zero gravity. “Without gravity, you now have to consider the arm’s reaction torques on the satellite to avoid flinging it into space,” Downs says. Any motion from the arm during the insertion process, especially from increased forces, could cause the satellite to continue movement in that direction. To combat that, Downs is performing calculations for the project to direct targeted reverse thrusts and counter the force of the robot’s motions. Her graduate project captures the simple yet complex nature of robotics that she finds fascinating, she says. “I think robots are both more and also less complicated than people think,” she says. “Really, all you need to start programming a robot is its Denavit-Hartenberg parameters , and you can do a lot with that,” she says, referencing the four values used to describe the position and orientation of a robotic arm and manipulators. Even with different grippers and degrees of freedom, “fundamentally, all robot manipulators start there,” she says. “But,” she adds, “we’re still learning so much about how robots interact with their environment. Even something simple to us, like manipulating a pen, is still incredibly complex for robots.” Downs is completing her doctoral thesis in the Robotic Space Simulator project at Texas A&M’s Robotics and Automation Design (RAD) Lab , which specializes in developing machines that can survive in extreme environments. It collaborates with NASA. Her thesis advisor is Robert Ambrose , a NASA veteran who launched the RAD Lab in 2022. The IEEE member is set to serve as associate director of the school’s Space Institute, due to open this year in Houston. The research facility is being built next to the Johnson Space Center . After earning her Ph.D., Downs says, she hopes to one day work for NASA, developing rovers that collect samples from Mars or robotic arms that perform tasks on space stations. To learn more about robots, check out IEEE Spectrum ’s guide . Getting out of the engineering bubble Downs joined IEEE in 2020 as a freshman at UTulsa to get more involved in electrical engineering events on campus. At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic kept clubs and organizations from meeting in person. She was active in her school’s IEEE student branch and was elected as its 2022–2024 president. Under her leadership, the branch went from having a few events to hosting one every two weeks. They included lunch-and-learn sessions and dinners that connected students with professional engineers and the university’s alumni. Downs also organized hands-on workshops on soldering, 3D printing , CAD modeling, and résumé-building . Her efforts helped increase the branch’s executive board membership from roughly five students to 25 in 2023. The same year, her soldering workshop attracted about 80 students. She says she enjoyed working with IEEE, especially “engaging with alumni and learning from engineers.” IEEE is a great resource for networking opportunities, she says, noting that “during the COVID-19 pandemic, engineering students stayed in their bubbles.” IEEE events helped the students make connections that could serve them well, she says. “Networking is very important, especially in today’s tough job market,” she says. “It’s a lot about who you know and how people observe your work ethic.” Downs, who now serves as an IEEE graduate advisor for UTulsa’s student branch, says she has seen firsthand how the school’s student branch network has benefited its student members. “A lot of them have found jobs” because of IEEE, she says. The working and networking of an engineer As the IEEE graduate advisor for UTulsa’s student branch, Downs noticed that many engineering undergraduates finish college without any hands-on experience , whether it be a project or an internship. “Their résumés are very sparse, and they have no proof of their technical skills,” she says. She herself completed a facilities engineering internship at Tulsa International Airport ’s American Airlines maintenance facility after her sophomore year of college. And she was an electrical engineering intern at Flight Safety International outside Tulsa after her junior year and after she graduated. The company designs, builds, and maintains its own flight simulators. Her advice to undergraduates is to hone and demonstrate both their hard and soft skills by working on research projects or even personal passion projects. “A Raspberry Pi doesn’t cost that much, and you can start working with that immediately,” she says. Students also can take part in engineering interest groups and professional organizations at their school, she adds. “Put yourself out there and join a research team,” she says. “It’s a great way to show people that you’re a good person to work with and you’d do a good job in the field.” She adds that it’s also a fine way to keep learning—which is what drew her to a field that has developed only within the past century. “We’re still constantly learning about robots,” she says. “Don’t stop asking questions,” she advises students. “Especially in engineering, don’t pretend like you know everything, because science is about constantly wanting to learn and listen.”