Monday, September 19, 2011

WPI, NASA taking teams for robot challenge

By Rodney H. Brown

Worcester Polytechnic Institute and NASA have opened up registration for the $1.5 million robotics challenge the two announced in February.

The Sample Return Robot Challenge asks teams to “demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from a wide and varied terrain without human control.” The competition for the $1.5 million in NASA prize money is planned to be held at WPI in Worcester in June of 2012, and officials said they expect to have hundreds of competitors, drawn from both academia and industry.

The prize money is being posted by NASA through its Centennial Challenges competition program, which has held and funded 21 events since 2005, according to a release from WPI. So far, under the program, NASA has awarded $4.5 million to 13 challenge-winning teams.

NASA first announced its plans for the Sample Return Robot Challenge in July 2010, when it also announced its two other new competitions, the Night Rover Challenge and the Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge. NASA and WPI announced they were teaming up for the Sample Return Robot Challenge in February. 

In June, WPI’s Team Oryx won a separate NASA-sponsored robotics competition – the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage Exploration Robo-Ops Competition. The first-place win garnered the students on the team a $5,000 prize and a stipend to attend the Desert RATS analog testing event. The competition required that each team build a robotic rover to tackle a number of tasks and challenges, including navigating a rock yard and collecting up to 30 different rocks.