African Inventor of the Month: Dr Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu

Dr Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu is a Ghanaian robotics engineer currently working at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. He has extensive experience in planetary rover operations, distributed mobile robotics, among others. 

As a chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr Trebi-Ollennu has worked on a number of space exploration jets. The latest is the InSight project, a robotic lander he designed to explore the deep interiors of Mars. Dr Trebi-Ollennu is also a Fellow of the IEE (UK) and a Senior Member of IEEE (USA).

Though he received his B. Eng in Avionics at the Queen Mary University of England in 1991, Dr Trebi-Ollennu’s journey to space began back home in Ghana. As a kid, he’d been fascinated by aircraft flying over his home near Accra’s Kotoka International Airport. He was partiuclarly interested in auto-piloting aircrafts and read voraciously on the Glass Cockpit systems.

NASA

In 1999, Dr Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory having completed a PhD in Control Systems Engineering. He was put in charge of various flight projects, and also did some technical writing for NASA. Dr Trebi-Ollennu also worked on review boards and offered recommendations for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and its Office of Education proposals. 

Dr Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu is currently the Product Delivery Manager for the InSight Mars Mission Instrument Deployment System. The robotic lander, which he helped build, will investigate the deep interiors of Mars to study incidents of marsquakes in order to understand the phenomenon that led to the red planet’s formation. Prior to that, Dr Trebi Ollennu also worked on the Phoenix Mars Lander project that discovered water on Mars.

Dr Trebi-Ollennu is a research scholar at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

In Ghana

In 2011, Dr Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu established the Ghana Robotic Academy Foundation, (GRAF). At its heart, the foundation aims to inspire and unlock creativity and innovation among young Ghanaians in the area of science and technology. To help achieve its mission, a series of workshops dubbed Robotics Inspired Science Education (RiSE) was established to inspire and energize teachers and students in Junior High Schools, Senior High Schools, as well as colleges. The effort culminated in a triumph at the Google RISE Award two years later.

Dr Trebi-Ollennu is a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences

Awards

The Ghanaian engineer received the 2008 NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal for his efforts in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. He was cited for “…exceptional technical contributions to the Mars Exploration Rovers…” as well as for the comprehensive engineering support he provided during pre-launch and post-launch of the mission. 

A year before that, he was awarded the Sir Monty Finniston Achievement Medal from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK, Europe’s largest professional society for engineers. He also received the 2007 Outstanding Engineer Award from IEEE Region 6 (12 states in western USA). The robotics engineer was cited for his particular contribution to the resolution of an anomaly in the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity robotic arm. His exceptional technical leadership led to the successful deployment of the robot and a subsequent fruitful mission on Mars.

Dr. Trebi-Ollennu has won a dozen other awards, including a JPL Mariner for outstanding leadership in the analysis and resolution of the IDD unstow anomaly on Opportunity rover; and NASA Space Act Awards for his contributions in Mars Exploration Rover Ground Based Rover Localization as well as Mars Rover Pair Cooperatively Grasping and Lifting a Long Payload, both in 2005.