NASA Gives MIT A Pair of Humanoid Robots Designed for Space Exploration

Steve Jurczyk, an associate administrator at NASA said that progress of human-robotic collaboration is crucial to developing the potentiality required for humankind’s journey to the red planet.

MIT has been tasked by NASA to make a robot that will be used for future space missions.

As large as a linebacker with a six foot, 290 pound frame, the bot known as Valkyrie (or R5) is part of NASA’s upcoming Space Robotics Challenge.

While the original objective of the robot was disaster relief, NASA now plans on sending the Valkyrie to Mars in the future. This challenge aims to create more dexterous autonomous robots that can help or even take the place of humans in “extreme space” missions. “For the first time in quite a few time we will no longer be dependent on any other nation to get our crews into space, and for us in this day and age that is critically important”.

NASA just announced two university groups that were selected to help develop and upgrade official NASA robots that will someday explore Mars and beyond.

Several prototypes of the bot, officially dubbed R5, were handed over to the Northeastern University in Boston and MA Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to the R5 prototype, the teams will also receive up to $250,000 per year for two years from NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directive (STMD), as well as access to on site and virtual technical support from NASA. He even predicted that a crew of robots would spending years helping to build a permanent Martian outpost before astronauts hit the ground.

Meet Valkyrie, NASA JSC’s DARPA Robotics Challenge humanoid robot.

Two university groups receive their very own Valkyrie robots from NASA as part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

The MIT team will be led by Russ Tedrake while the Northeastern team will be headed up by Taskin Padir. A virtual contest using robotic simulations. 2.

We look forward to all the fun space exploration the teams’ developments enable-that is, if the robots give us permission to participate. Both research groups will be working on software to make R5 perform better.

Tedrake has also been CSAIL’s research center for autonomous cars, a Toyota-sponsored initiative to teach cars to navigate without human input.