NASA Langley is using KollabNet. One of its applications is on an innovative robotics project at Langley's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab.

KollabNet is being applied to the earliest phases of the design process, when a great deal of brainstorming and far-ranging research takes place. The project team uses KollabNet to track this converging exploratory activity and create a history - a "graphical audit trail" - of decisions, their rationale, and links to references.

Project Engineer Sam Miller says: "The project focuses around designing/building/programming an omni-directional robot with a sensor package that includes a reconfigurable scalable computer (RSC) system, an x-ray fluoroscope, a visual-spectrum fluoroscope, an Air Force Research Lab acoustic array, plus IR, omni-directional, and stereoscopic cameras.

"The platform is designed as a mobile technology-demonstration platform for all the sensors above, with the RSC eventually forming the data-processing core of the robot.

"We are looking to KollabNet to help us capture and manage the knowledge we generate in all stages of the product design, particularly the very early stages - where ideas are transitory and short-lived, but nevertheless have great impact on the project's overall trajectory.

"As with any engineering project, there are a large number of tradeoffs in each area of our enterprise (price, size, power, time, etc.). We are looking tp KollabNet to help us address these diverse requirements for the greatest benefit of the five independent research teams involved, by tying all the team's individual requirements together and dynamically tracking/analyzing them as the project progresses."

Miller first encountered KollabNet at COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software. "I saw how the documents - the driving parameters of a project - could be tied to the CAD model and to all our calculation tools, so that any change to a document would immediately be reflected in other documents, because of the object-level linking."

Miller sees the potential to apply KollabNet to many other NASA projects. "I can't envision managing complex and critical projects without a tool like KollabNet," he said.