Penn researchers work with NASA to design robotic methods for extraterrestrial environments

Penn’s Sung Robotics Lab is working with NASA to steer an initiative investigating how robots can discover and navigate extraterrestrial environments.

The challenge, titled “Temporarily, Robots Unite to Surmount Sandy Entrapments, then Separate,” is led by School of Engineering and Applied Sciences researchers from the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception Lab in partnership with NASA and researchers from different universities. Their analysis facilities round a multi-robot system that permits the robots to bodily join, pulling and pushing one another to beat environmental hazards.

Engineering professor and principal lead Cynthia Sung stated {that a} objective of the challenge is to create a robotic that may efficiently work together with lunar surfaces.

“We aim to design systems that perform real-world tasks as best as possible,” Sung told Penn Engineering Today. “To do this, we have to build the complexity of the environment into the model as well as find ways where our work in soft robotics’ interactions applies to hard robots traversing soft, sandy terrain.”

Towards this finish, researchers mixed wheeled rovers and legged robots to maximise maneuverability and stability.

“By relying on multiple individual robots instead of one, we create a more robust system aligned with NASA’s current robotic infrastructure,” Sung added. “If one robot fails, the system can still function. That wouldn’t be the case if we just designed one robot that could do all the jobs needed.”

The challenge’s website explains {that a} precedence is to have “heterogeneous teams of ground robots” in order that “each robot interacts differently with the terrain, offering unique capabilities in team operations.” With such a various workforce of robots, the robots can divide tastes and discover troublesome environments, making lunar and Martian missions extra possible.

The analysis follows a $2 million grant from NASA in December 2023 to assist the challenge.

In August, the researchers examined the brand new multi-robot system on the White Sands National Park in New Mexico, the place they had been capable of reproduce related circumstances to the moon and Mars.

During their area testing, researchers noticed that the robots linked collectively and had been capable of climb up about 2.5 meters up the sand dunes. The workforce described this as a “big success” because it confirmed how the multi-robot methods might deal with environments presently off-limits to single rovers.  

The workforce is scheduled to current the system on the NASA Ames Research Center in early 2026. According to Sung, the restricted room offered to the robots to maneuver will make the demonstration additional difficult.

“We’re a little nervous, sure,” challenge researcher and sixth-year Engineering Ph.D. candidate Shivangi Misra stated to Penn Engineering Today. “With every test we run, there is something to improve in the hardware [and] the software. But we’ve done what feels like the hard part, and we think we’re in pretty good shape for what comes next.”