Summary

Description

<p>During 2013 and 2015, the DARPA Robotics Challenge explored through a competition the tasks and technologies for robots to operate in a natural and man-made disasters.  NASA’s future need for robots in support of human exploration has significant overlap with the terrestrial need for disaster relief robots.  The area of focus is operations in areas that are difficult to access, are potentially hazardous to humans, and communications between robots and operators may have intermittent, limited or delayed networks.  Additionally, both NASA and disaster relief scenarios call for robots to arrive ahead of humans to perform work such as scouting and setting up logistics.</p><p>During FY2013, NASA developed the Robonaut 5 robot for participation in the DARPA Robotics Challenge trials in December 2013.  The design of this robot was an aggressive build that was focused a strong showing at the DRC finals in 2015.  This approach sacrificed performance at the qualifying trials during December 2013.  </p><p>During FY14, the R5 team partnered with the Institute for Human Machine Cognition (IHMC) robotics group through the National Robotics Initiative grant to apply IHMC’s walking algorithms to R5.  Throughout FY14, IHMC has improved R5’s walking, adding software to move towards the designed capabilities.</p><p>In partnership with the National Science Foundation, NASA will produce two new R5 humanoid robots to be provided to two US robotics teams through a solicited competition.  During FY15, NASA will develop the Space Robotics Challenge with the Centennial Challenges program, with the desire to apply humanoid capabilities to future NASA applications.  The challenge will be a NASA centennial challenge those provided with a Robonaut 5 robot will use it in the challenge and winners of a simulation contest will also use the existing Robonaut 5 robots to compete.  </p><p>Details of the challenge are scheduled to be released in late spring/summer 2015.</p>