TRACLabs

Texas Robotics and Automation Center Laboratories (TRACLabs), located in Houston, Texas, is growing as a leader in Intelligent Systems and Robotics research with the mission of developing new technologies and products for emerging markets. Formerly a division of Metrica, a small, minority, woman-owned business (SDB, WOSB), TRACLabs has a strong team of engineers and scientists with diverse backgrounds and national recognition for their research. This team has previously developed new technology and completed research for MITRE Corp. and for NASA in the area of automation and robotics. This included research and development work on the NASA Extra-Vehicular Activity Robot Project, Intelligent Systems Architecture Project, the Mobile Robotics Project, leading-edge research in robot perception and vision, robot manipulator design, modular robot design, space qualified robot hardware design and human-computer interface technology. Several TRACLabs commercial products have resulted from previous NASA SBIR awards, including an innovative camera head that has been sold worldwide and a robotic manipulator that has been sold to NASA, the Navy and leased to universities. In 2000, TRACLabs/Metrica received the national Tibbetts Award from the Small Business Administration for outstanding contributions to the SBIR program.
TRACLabs is housed in a 2500 square foot facility with laboratory and office space adjacent to NASA Johnson Space Center, offering easy access to NASA JSC scientists and engineers with whom TRACLabs employees work closely. TRACLabs has over a dozen networked Linux and Windows computers. All of TRACLabs' computers have a broadband connection to the Internet and are internally connected via gigabit Ethernet or 802.11b/g inside our facility. Internally TRACLabs has file servers with hundreds of gigabytes of storage routinely backed up with off-site equipment. TRACLabs has licenses for major software development systems including Microsoft Visual Studio, LISP, Matlab/Simulink and Eclipse. TRACLabs maintains all of its computers, web site, e-mail servers and file servers with an on-site staff. TRACLabs is committed to refreshing its computational infrastructure on a regular basis. TRACLabs' robotics infrastructure includes a Pioneer mobile robot and a Sony AIBO. TRACLabs' computer vision assets include multiple digital, color cameras and several pan-tilt heads.