Every year NASA hosts the Centennial Challenge to encourage the community of technologists to solve problems of interest to NASA (and science).  The challenge from 2012 to the present has been to build an autonomous robot capable of navigating a field, finding and gathering various items (like a ball, hockey puck, or metal discs with oh-so-hard-to-recognize patterns on them),  and returning them to a small platform.  NASA hopes to learn and use the best techniques employed by participants on future autonomous Mars robots that will locate core samples left on the surface of Mars by the rover and return them to a collector.

I joined team Survey in 2013, a group 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 the first tier of the two-tier challenge in 2013, and we were joined by another team in 2014.  The challenge event is held every year until one team completes it.  To date, no team has succeeded, but that may change this year...

EDIT: This year (2015) the team from West Virginia University completed the second tier of the challenge and took home a nice chunk of money.   The competition is expected to continue next year as teams compete for the remainder of the $1 million prize pool.

For more details check out the NASA Sample Return page.