Sample Return: Team Survey Robot
NASA Sample Return Robot Challenge · 2013-2014
NASA Sample Return Challenge (external link, opens in a new tab)
Every year NASA hosts Centennial Challenges to encourage researchers and technologists to solve some of the most difficult problems in space exploration. The challenge from 2012-2015 was to build an autonomous robot capable of navigating a field, finding and gathering various items (like a ball, hockey puck, or metal discs with unique patterns on them), and returning them to a small platform. NASA hoped to learn from and use the best techniques employed by participants on future autonomous Mars robots that would locate core samples left on the surface of Mars by a rover and return them to a collector.
In 2013, I joined Team Survey, a group comprised of my colleagues at Applied Minds, who are among the most talented and experienced engineers and roboticists I have met. We were the first team to complete tier one of the two-tier challenge in 2013, and West Virginia University completed both tiers in 2015, taking home a nice chunk of money.
