Page 35 - FCW, November, December 2018

PROJECT: Open-Source Rover NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
A platform for innovation:
NASA’s DIY robot
A robotic rover rolled onto the stage at
last year’s Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference. It had six wheels, a black metal frame and a small red beanie sitting atop it. Then it introduced itself.
“I am JPL’s open-source rover,” the machine said in the serious, female voice we’ve come to expect from virtual assistants. “Today, I will be trying to find life on this stage just like JPL does every day on Mars.”
It rolled over to a wall built of cinder blocks and determined it could not go
any farther, so it deployed a smaller robot that scaled the wall and used a camera
to determine that there might be life on the other side. The rover then sent two small Pop-Up Flat-Folding Explorer Robots (PUFFERs) to go under the wall in search of life.
“PUFFER has discovered something interesting,” the rover said. “Analyzing image. Martian detected.”
The image was a photo of Matt Damon from the movie “The Martian.”
Such ambassadorial show-and-tell was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s original motivation for developing the educational rover, or ROV-E. The idea quickly evolved, however, into creating an open-source project so that high school science classes and others interested in engineering could build the robots themselves.
“We wanted to build it from commercially available, off-the-shelf parts so that any hobbyist” or high school student could
build it, said Tom Soderstrom, JPL’s chief technology and innovation officer.
The rover was designed by two JPL interns and an early-career employee, and at least three high schools have already built their own and plan to integrate the robots into their engineering curriculums.
JPL created a build list for the robot knowing that, “if it wasn’t good enough,
we would have been overwhelmed with requests for support,” Soderstrom said. The lab then beta-tested the list with a couple of high schools before releasing it.
Like any open-source project, the rover
is designed to evolve. The conference demonstration illustrated the potential
of internet-of-things applications, but Soderstrom said robotic arms and advanced sensors are also possibilities.
“It became a very interesting capability of just using this open-source rover as the platform for innovation and building on top of it very quickly,” he added.
PROJECT: LEADER Replacement System
Los Angeles County Department of Social Services
Future-proofing social
services delivery
As the country’s largest local social services agency, the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services works with one out of every three county residents. More than 4 million people receive some $4 billion annually in services related to employment, homelessness, health care, nutrition and child welfare.
To manage a system that large, complex and growing, the county built the LEADER Replacement System. LRS takes the place of 17 legacy systems and automates enrollment, eligibility determination
and benefit distribution. It also monitors business processes and key metrics across multiple programs, giving the county real-time business performance metrics by office.
By consolidating and integrating multiple systems, the county was able to present a single web portal and mobile app to clients for accessing a variety of programs. The system supports self- screening, online enrollment, access
to case information and electronic communications.
In addition, caseworkers and supervisors now use a single system, which streamlines
processes across multiple business areas and features a task-based solution to help them manage their workloads.
LRS has over 20,000 users and processes over 5 million transactions a day with a response time of 1 second to 3 seconds — about 10 faster than before. The system’s rules engine is designed to adapt as health and human services evolve, regulations change and automation increases.
Once LRS was up and running, the county terminated several contracts for legacy systems, which saved nearly $70 million in the system’s first year of operations.
LRS has been so successful that the state plans to migrate the other 57 California counties to an enhanced version of LRS, dubbed the Statewide Automated Welfare System.
Project: RockNSM Missouri National Guard Cyber Team
Citizen-soldiers’ cyber
solution
When it comes to cybersecurity, time is
of the essence. So the Missouri National Guard Cyber Team (MOCYBER) designed a capability that shrank the time it takes
to collect information from compromised servers from two days down to 20 minutes.
Dissatisfied with firewalls and other available tools, MOCYBER sought to dramatically reduce software development time and reduce risk while keeping existing applications intact. The team’s solution
is the Response Operation Collection Kit Network Security Monitoring (RockNSM), which consolidates multiple open-source tools into a single platform to facilitate data collection and incident response.
Beyond blocking threats, the platform allows the team to discern traffic patterns so that it can improve hacking prediction and enhance forensics after a breach. RockNSM has worked so well that MOCYBER shared the code on GitHub. Now the U.S. military services, commercial sector and allied forces
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