Space Robotics Challenge

The Space Robotics Challenge seeks to infuse robot autonomy from the best and brightest research groups in the robotics community into NASA robots for future missions to Mars and/or the moon. In doing so, NASA will provide the country's most complex humanoid robots to these groups for testing.

Benefits to NASA Funded Missions: This technology provides potential benefits to any place humans explore. The humanoid robots can handle the dull, dangerous and dirty exploration, while humans use their problem solving abilities in situations where the robots require help. The application of these robots is to increase autonomy capabilities for both surface (R5/Valkyrie) and in microgravity (Robonaut). If successful, the results of this work could infuse directly onto Robonaut on ISS. Benefits to NASA Unfunded & Planned Missions: A primarily application of this work is to add autonomy for humanoid robotics. Current Human Mars architectures are showing that infrastructure for these human missions will be in place prior to launching humans. Within these architectures, robotic systems will set up infrastructure and serve as caretakers while waking for crew. The space robotics challenge tasks for R5/Valkyrie are directly applicable to this work. In transit to Mars, the pre-deployed assets spacecraft will need caretaking and maintenance. The autonomy coming out of the SRC is directly applicable to this task as applied to Robonaut class robots. Benefits to Other Government Agencies: Autonomy for humanoid robots has applications within the DoD for disaster relief. In fact, the SRC is a follow-on program to the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The Department of Energy has applications for robots and humanoid robots in waste cleanup. Benefits to the Commercial Space Industry: This item does not benefit the nation. Benefits to the Nation: The SRC places robots in university labs (MIT and Northeastern) as partners to validate space related tasks and to host competition teams during development. By offering NASA robots to the broader robotics community, it supports training of new top of profession performers, leading to new education of the formation of new robotics companies, benefitting the nation through a better educated workforce or a growing economy

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.