Gadgetory

I'm Andrew button I'm the Technical Operations Director for the Google Lunar XPrize I'm here today at D fki in Bremen Germany with one of the judges from the Google Lunar XPrize we're here to look at some testing activities being done by the team part-time scientists they're a bunch of guys who technically active in other industries and they've got together who form a team to go after the Google Lunar XPrize in their spare time it informed about four years ago when I first thought about the goona XPrize from down it really just grow the entire team and yeah it's been four years since I'm Alan Wells I'm an emeritus professor at the University of Leicester and I'm one of the Google XPrize judges Google have introduced these milestone prizes as a stimulus and as a means of measuring genuine progress towards the ultimate objective and that's where we are at the moment the goal of Tesla today is to verify the image quality of the camera so the reason why we've come here to the DFK eye institute is because they have this very awesome space hall which is capable of simulating realistic lunar lighting conditions to demonstrate a very high resolution and high frame rate video is something that it's not that easy to do the thing that we want to achieve today is actually verify that the image quality of the camera that we have built this latest prototype matches up with the requirements of the MTA MTA is the master team agreement basically the rules of the competition so if it doesn't match up and we send it to space then we can actually get disqualified the reason why you saw us putting up different folders in front of the camera is actually because we have been mixing two different types of cameras so we're having two black-and-white cameras which are the the parallel ones there were ones for the stereoscopic imaging that we used to do this 3d scanning of the surface and measuring distances to certain focal points and then we have of course the teller lens which is in the middle and the telemon's and is actually different in a way that the the other two cameras actually already color sensors today capable of seeing color themselves but the teller lens is a black-and-white sensor if you use a color sensor to capture your colored image that's totally fine but the point is the quality is better if you use a black and white sensor and apply in white kinds of filters what we did to be able to get things done quickly and test it quickly is that we've ordered all of the parts from the camera as Sweeny printed parts so they're basically plastic this gave out the advantage that we could quickly test the image quality but of course it has a disadvantage that we can't do all of the other tests that we want to do for example the summer vacuum test is something that you can't do with the plastic part or the mechanical load test but of course for the image quality it does matter if the housing is plastic the reason why I believe this entire Google XPrize and pop time science is pretty awesome at least for me and for most of the people on our team is that you you get to learn so much more things that you would have never come in contact with in your normal life I think if we need really free will already ruled live you