Fall 2011 GRASP Seminar – Wendell Chun, Lockheed Martin, “Robotics: A Long Way to Get Here and Still a Long Way to Go”

Wendell Chun has 33 years of experience with Lockheed Martin Space
Company in Denver, Colorado, performing a wide and diverse range of engineering
disciplines from mechanical engineering to systems engineering. He is a
graduate of the University of Hawaii and Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University. Wendell is currently on the faculty at the University of
Denver since 2003, teaching both undergraduate and graduate classes in
robotics, design, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Working in robotics for over 30 years, he has
been a member of the following world-leading robot research and development
programs at Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin: Autonomous Land Vehicle,
Intelligent Task Automation, Unmanned Ground Vehicle Demo II, Automated Highway
System, Flight Telerobotic Servicer, and the Unmanned Ground Combat
Vehicle. Wendell Chun was Principal
Investigator for Lockheed Martin research into autonomous rendezvous and
docking, precision landing, and software for autonomous operations. He also has
experience in spacecraft design, working on the Manned Maneuvering Unit
structure, mechanical design on the Faint Object Spectrograph experiment within
the Hubble Space Telescope, and test & verification on mechanisms on
classified programs. Recent activities
included rendezvous and docking lead on the NASA Alternate Access to Space
program (a pre-cursor to COTS), technical lead for LM proposal on COTS, and technical
lead on the AFRL Reasoner proposal in which was won. Wendell was the Vehicle Systems Management Architect
on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) program, having responsibility for
automation & autonomy, health & status, fault detection & isolation,
mission planning, resource management, etc.
In his last position, he supported NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on a
robotic satellite demonstration and future satellite servicing robot.