The fun thing about spending time at MIT is that you always run into interesting things. Couple of days ago, I encountered the MIT Bot submission for NASA - Sample Return Robot Challenge.
NASA and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester teamed up for competing in the Sample Return Robot Challenge to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from a wide and varied terrain without human control.
Sample Return Robot Challenge is part of NASA centennial challenges; a robot which has autonomous capability to locate and retrieve specific sample types from various locations over a wide and varied terrain and return those samples to a designated zone in a reasonable amount of time with limited mapping data.
The challenge description follows:
The Sample Return Robot Challenge is scheduled for June 14-17, 2012 in Worcester, MA. The Challenge requires demonstration of an autonomous robotic system to locate and collect a set of specific sample types from a large planetary analog area and then return the samples to the starting zone. The roving area will include open rolling terrain, granular medium, soft soils, and a variety of rocks, and immovable obstacles (trees, large rocks, water hazards, etc.) A pre-cached sample and several other samples will be located in smaller sampling zones within the larger roving area. Teams will be given aerial/geological/topographic maps with appropriate orbital resolution, including the location of the starting position and a pre-cached sample.
MIT Robotics Team 2015 Promo Video
The bot is powered with the following technologies:
ROS: The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it's all open source. www.ros.org
Arduino: Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for anyone making interactive projects.
RabbitMQ for Async messaging: RabbitMQ is a messaging broker - an intermediary for messaging. It gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.
Update:
MIT team couldn't make it to the challenge due to some technical issues. NASA has awarded $100,000 in prize money to the Mountaineers, a team from West Virginia University, Morgantown, for successfully completing Level 2 of the Sample Return Robot Challenge, part of the agency’s Centennial Challenges prize program.
- Robots Face Off in $1.5 Million NASA Sample Return Challenge
- NASA's robot event challenges, robots, engineers
- NASA Awards $100,000 to Winning Team of Robot Challenge
- MIT CrowdFunding Page
- MIT RoboTeam
