Interviewed – Cameron Ower, MDA’s Chief Technology Officer

SNN

4 years ago

The Canadarm2 robotic arm and Dextre, the fine-tuned robotic hand, are remotely controlled on Earth to extract Bartolomeo from the pressurized trunk of the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship. Bartolomeo is a European Space Agency science payload system that will enable numerous external science experiments to be conducted and controlled outside the space station. Credit: NASA. (Marc 25, 2020)

Interviewed – Cameron Ower, MDA’s Chief Technology Officer — The Canadarm2 robotic arm and Dextre, the fine-tuned robotic hand, are remotely controlled on Earth to extract Bartolomeo from the pressurized trunk of the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship. Bartolomeo is a European Space Agency science payload system that will enable numerous external science experiments to be conducted and controlled outside the space station. Credit: NASA. (Marc 25, 2020)

This week the Terranauts podcast focuses on 35 years of robotic technology development for space seen through the eyes of MDA’s Chief Technology Officer, Cameron Ower.

Dr. Cameron Ower is the Chief Technology Officer at MDA, formerly known as McDonald Dettwiler and Associates, where he has been working for much of the last 35 years.

When he started at MDA (then known as Spar Aerospace) he worked with and for the engineers who had designed and built the very first space robot, the original Space Shuttle Canadarm. His job, at the time, was to design the next generation of space robot – the space station arm and its special purpose dexterous manipulator known as DEXTRE.

This would become the first robot to live and work permanently in space. Today, he is helping lead the team of engineers that is designing the Canadarm 3, the robot that will help humans work and live farther from home than we ever have before. Tune in to hear what has (and hasn’t) changed in the last 35 years the world of space automation and robotics.

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