From 2002 to 2005 I had the incredible opportunity and privilege to participate in NASA’s Reduce Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program. Over the course of 4 years I was a member, leader, and then advisor of the Float’n Illini at the University of Illinois. We were fortunate over those four years to have had several projects accepted and were invited down to JSC to fly our experiments on the KC-135 and later the DC-9.
One thing that was extremely important to the success of our experiments while on the KC-135 was that we automated the experiments so that they were automatically triggered on the change in gravity. I would say this kind of qualifies as a robot ;). This was extremely important given how hard it is to control your body position in zero-g. Nothing like floating away from the button you are trying to push to start your experiment. This meant that while the experiment was running I could do cool things like this:
