Universe today has a story(1) about a project at MIT that involves a NASA-built humanoid robot called R5 or Valkyrie. Valkyrie was designed by a group of engineers at NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center (2) as an entry into the 2013 DARPA Robotic Challenge Trial, where it performed less than optimally.

NASA then partnered with a number of outside organizations to improve the robot’s performance with improved algorithms. The new and enhanced Valkyrie will become an entry in NASA’s Space Robotics Centennial Challenge, where it is hoped that it will perform better than it did three years ago.

Building Robots to Explore Space

The NASA challenge will set robots to do a number of tasks that would take place at a Mars base or lunar base. The functions include:

• Aligning a communications array
• Repairing a broken solar array
• Identifying and fixing a habitat leak

Previously to Valkyrie, another robot, dubbed Robonaut2 or R2 (3), was sent for testing to the International Space Station. R2 was designed to take over some of the mundane and time-consuming maintenance tasks the astronauts usually undertake, freeing up time to do experiments.

Often, when work has to be done outside the ISS, astronauts have to put on space suits and go EVA, a task that is often fraught with danger. Several astronauts have had their lives placed at risk because of suit malfunctions. A robot, on the other hand, would be able to perform the same maintenance tasks without endangering astronauts.

NASA’s Journey to Mars

NASA is embarked on its Journey to Mars. Other countries and some private groups would like to go back to the moon. A concept is emerging that would involve the first footsteps on either world being trodden by robots instead of humans. The robots, perhaps like Valkyrie, would set up habitats and perform other tasks in advance of the first humans. When astronauts do join the robots, both will work side by side to explore the new world.

NASA and other space agencies have always used robots for space exploration. Modern versions include the Mars Curiosity rover now rolling across the Martian surface and New Horizons, which hurtled past Pluto over a year ago. But these robots are under the complete control of human programmers, who have to upload instructions, often across interplanetary distances, for the robotic probes to function.