Someday, American astronauts may land on the moon again: that’s the intent behind NASA’s Artemis campaign to live and work on Earth’s satellite in preparation for human missions to Mars.
If that day comes, robotics research currently being conducted at the University of Nevada, Reno might play a small part in that achievement.
Computer Science assistant professors Christos Papachristos and Parikshit Maini are developing technologies for a new generation of autonomous space worker robots that could build and prepare extraterrestrial sites on the moon and Mars for future human and robot missions. The two, along with project team members Alireza Tavakkoli, George Bebis and Eelke Folmer, also are building an interactable digital worksite twin — sort of a gamified virtual environment — that will enable scientists on Earth to monitor the off-planet situation and use natural interaction to prescribe work tasks for the robots to carry out.
“We envision a new paradigm for human-robot collaboration,” Papachristos said, “ideal for surface engineering and pre-colonization of remote environments at inter-planetary distances, where human cognition persistently supervises and drives the high-level objectives of a long-term mission, with autonomous robots being the intelligent workers that execute the plan.”
The three-year project, “Prospecting and Pre-Colonization of the Moon and Mars using Autonomous Robots with Human-in-the-Loop,” is funded with $1.1 million from NASA’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and the state of Nevada. The grant, awarded last summer to the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE), brings together experts from the University of Nevada, Reno; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; the Desert Research Institute; and NASA Ames Research Center to create a seamless, human-robot collaboration framework and adaptive robotic systems for remote planetary operations.
“We are thrilled that NASA has chosen to fund the Nevada team and their pioneering research,” Eric Wilcox, director of Nevada NASA EPSCoR, said. “This work will not only advance NASA’s missions but also foster significant technological development within Nevada and strengthen the collaborative relationship between NSHE researchers and the NASA Ames Research Center. This project exemplifies the innovative spirit of our state’s research community and its potential to contribute to NASA’s moon-to-Mars exploration efforts.”
Plenty of space
Nevada itself plays a role in this project: most of the state is part of the Great Basin Desert. It has barren, rocky terrain that experiences high daytime temperatures and cold nights, not unlike the moon — the perfect place to test these robotic systems.
“We are near open desert environments, which present us with the possibility of conducting Martian analog deployments,” Papachristos said, standing in his Robotic Workers Lab in the William N. Pennington Engineering Building and gesturing to the east of the University campus.
What might they be testing? The team has designed an autonomous mobile robot for soil sampling and also is developing adaptive sampling algorithms to enable resource prospecting and spatial mapping in field conditions. The autonomous mobile manipulation systems in Papachristos’ lab are being equipped with algorithms to manipulate large and arbitrarily shaped natural objects, such as rocks, by intelligently using their bodies and robotic arms to lift, push and/or tumble them. Along with collaborators from UNLV, the team is also working on self-deployable, cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) that could be used for overhead monitoring — think of a Skycam at a sporting event — along with ground-based “worker” robots that could be used for clearing an area and mapping hazards and resources, Maini explained.
Additionally, the team is working on a system that will allow for human oversight of these mostly autonomous robots. Maini describes it as a gamified virtual representation or an “interactable digital worksite twin” of the extraterrestrial environment that earthbound scientists would use to persistently monitor the scene and prescribe work tasks for the robots, if necessary. This direction wouldn’t happen in real time due to the distances between Earth and the extraterrestrial sites: a one-way message from Earth to Mars can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on how far apart the planets are at the time. Even a message to the moon takes a few seconds. Still, the digital twin would allow human expertise to guide the robot mission via high-level instruction that would be carried out autonomously once received and validated.
“They can essentially interact via goal states that the deployed space worker robot systems achieve cooperatively,” Maini said.
Scientists have been using robotic systems to assist with space missions for a long time, but more recent efforts focus on the concept of using them to set up bases on the moon and Mars. The University, NSHE, NASA Ames Research Center and its other partners on the NASA EPSCOR grant could play a role in this goal.
“The development of autonomous robots that can operate effectively in the challenging environments of the moon and Mars is crucial for the success of future exploration missions,” Terry Fong, chief roboticist of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said. “The innovative research NASA will conduct through this partnership will not only advance our understanding of these environments but also push the boundaries of robotic technology, enabling us to explore deeper into space than ever before.”
