NASA has partnered with global innovation consultant organization NineSigma to launch a new competition for developing advanced robots.
The space agency has announced a reward of 1 million dollars prize for the competition that seeks to develop the capabilities of humanoid robots to set up habitats and life support systems prior to a manned mission to Mars.
Teams must programme a virtual droid based on NASA’s Robonaut 5 which is otherwise known as Valkyrie. The requirements, the robot-astronaut must posses high degree of flexibility and maneuverability and must perform 3 tasks in a simulated scenario of a Mars storm,
Aligning a communications against latency to represent communications delay from Earth to Mars.
Repairing a broken solar array
Identifying and repairing a habitat leak.
The team which is able to handle all situations in a the virtual ecosystem will walk away with the $1 million.
Reportedly, the competition will also have qualifying rounds before the main competition in which the participating team should demonstrate autonomous tracking abilities for the humanoid.
