Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu

Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, is a Ghanaian robotics engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the chief engineer and technical group leader for the mobility and manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory He has been associated with various NASA Mars missions, notably the Mars Rover and InSight projects.

Early life and education

Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu was born in Accra, Ghana, to Ga parents. Ollennu's father, Trebi Ollennu was an economist at the Ministry of Finance in Accra. As a child, Ashitey lived close to an airport and would always see airplanes fly by. This fascinated him and fostered his interest in space exploration, aircraft and aerial robots, particularly autopilots. He read a lot on the "Glass Cockpit" system for both military and civil airplanes. He attended Garrison Primary School in Burma Camp and completed his secondary education at the Ghana Secondary Technical School. He travelled to the United Kingdom where he received his bachelor's degree in engineering (BEng) in Avionics at the Queen Mary University of London in 1991, with a thesis on ''"Review of 4-D guidance techniques and the simulation of 4-D aircraft guidance"''. Between 1993 and 1996, he pursued his PhD in Control Systems Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University in the UK where he wrote his dissertation titled ''"Robust Non-linear Control Designs Using Adaptive Fuzzy Systems.''" He also holds a project management certification from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), earned in 2007.

Career

He joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1999 and rose through the ranks to become the leader of the team that designed the Mars Rover robot that landed on the red planet. Over the years, his responsibilities have involved flight projects, flight projects review boards, mission formulation, technology tasks, technical writing and proposals. He also served as a reviewer for NASA Science Mission Directorate technology proposals and NASA Office of Education proposals. Other engagements at NASA are 2003 – Mars Exploration Rover, 2007 – Phoenix Mars Lander and Mars Science Laboratory which is scheduled for launch in 2011 and will be NASA's third generation of rover to explore Mars.

Among his roles at the In Sight Mars Mission were Product Delivery Manager and Chief for the Instrument Deployment System, a technical group lead in the Robotic Manipulation & Sampling group at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1999. His technical research interests include on planetary rovers and its operations, system of systems, manipulation, multiple mobile robots (planetary outpost), mechatronics, reconfigurable robots, audjustable autonomy and man-machine interaction. Closely linked to these are various areas in robotics systems and engineering: Space Robotics Systems, Flight Systems Integration & Test, Planetary Rover Operations, System of Systems Design, Distributed Mobile Robotics, System Architectures, Dynamic Modeling, Control Systems design for Aerospace and Mechatronics Systems and Contract Technical Management. He has more than 95 publications to his credit.

He was a Research Scholar at the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh where he was instrumental in the design and implementation of a system of All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) for distributed tactical surveillance for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In an interview with the BBC
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