Undergrad And Graduate Level Students Will Be Eligible To
Compete
NASA and the National Institute of
Aerospace (NIA) are launching a 2012 undergraduate and graduate
level student robotics competition. The RASC-AL (Revolutionary
Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage) Exploration Robo-Ops
Student Challenge will allow up to eight teams to compete at NASA's
Johnson Space Center (JSC) next spring. The prize is $10,000 and a
chance to attend the popular analog and robotics testing event,
NASA Desert Rats, in the fall of 2012.
Interested teams are encouraged to submit a Notice of Intent by
Nov. 18 and their project plan by Dec. 9. Online submission forms,
along with full details on the competition, can be found on the
RASC-AL Robo-Ops website.
Teams should be comprised of students with various backgrounds,
including mechanical engineering, robotics engineering, computer
science, marketing and communications. During the competition, each
team will do education and public outreach to advocate for their
rover and NASA rover missions.
The Robo-Ops Steering Committee, which consists of researchers
from NASA and NIA, will review all submitted project plans and
select up to eight teams to move forward to the design and testing
portion of the challenge. These qualifying teams will receive a
stipend to help offset the development costs to design and build a
rover, and for travel-related costs for the 2012 Robo-Ops
Competition in Houston.
During this second phase of the competition,
three students and a faculty advisor from each team will travel
with their rover to the JSC "Rock Yard," while others will stay
behind at their local universities so they can control the vehicle
remotely. Each rover will have to be commanded from its home
university campus through a commercial broadband wireless uplink.
The only information available to the remote "driver" will be
information transmitted through on-board video camera(s) or other
on-board sensors. Sample tasks include negotiating specified
slopes, crossing sand and gravel pits, driving over rocks, and
picking up specific rock samples and placing them on the rover for
the remainder of the course.
The challenge is one of a number of participatory exploration
initiatives led by NIA. By charging students with designing,
building, and testing an interplanetary rover, NASA and NIA are
engaging them in work that parallels what real-life NASA
professionals are doing today. Fresh approaches to research
and concepts discovered in the students' unique rover designs also
have the potential to produce concepts and data for practical use
in NASA's design of planetary rovers.
"Robo-Ops provides real-world challenges - from a technological
perspective," said Pat Troutman, steering committee member from
NASA's Langley Research Center. "Through this competition, we get
to see ideas and technology advances that NASA might be able to
apply to future exploration rovers."
Robo-Ops is being launched at a time when interplanetary rovers
are again in the spotlight with the Mars Science Laboratory's
Curiosity rover set to embark on its journey to Mars later this
fall. Upon landing on the Red Planet, Curiosity will join its
counterpart Opportunity.
ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (04.15.24)
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