NASA's Robonaut, R5. (Image courtesy of NASA.)
The million dollar competition, aptly named the Space Robotics Challenge, aims to create a framework for a humanoid robot that is flexible, dexterous and can withstand the brutal Martian conditions.
To take home the $1M prize, teams will be required to program a virtual robot modeled after NASA’s Robonaut R5. The computer programs written by participants will need to guide the R5 through a series of tasks and be able to do so with a forced latency period imposed on communication between program and robot.
NASA says this latency represents the time it would take for instructions to be sent from Earth to Mars—approximately 20 minutes on average, depending on the distance between the two planets.
While NASA’s clever latency trap shouldn’t prove to be a huge stumbling block for programmers, the obstacles that they’ll have to face might be a bit of challenge. NASA’s vision for the challenge is a horrific one.
Each participant will be asked to guide their virtual R5 through a Martian hellscape where a dust storm has just damaged a habitat (no word on whether astronauts were inside, or if any of them survived). Surveying the damage, the R5 will have to align an off-kilter communications dish, repair a damaged solar array and fix the habitat’s breached hull.
“Precise and dexterous robotics, able to work with a communications delay, could be used in spaceflight and ground missions to Mars and elsewhere for hazardous and complicated tasks, which will be crucial to support our astronauts,” said Monsi Roman, program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges.
According to NASA, the development of flexible, dexterous robotic technologies will be critical for sustaining human life off world. In fact, engineers at the agency are already thinking of ways to deploy these bots, including sending them to the red planet to select landing sites, set up habitats, construct life-support systems and possibly even conduct scientific missions.