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NASA's Valkyrie Humanoid Robot Tested for Future Mars Colonization

NASA originally designed the Valkyrie (R5) humanoid robot several years ago to compete in DARPA's disaster-relief robotics contest, and now the agency is looking for outside expertise to craft it into a kind of space mechanic on Mars. The robot is the first step toward a goal of human colonization of Mars. In 2015, NASA shipped three Valkyries to Northeastern University, MIT, and Scotland's University of Edinburgh to test the robot's capabilities in various hostile environments. Northeastern University is currently testing their model at the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center - a warehouse filled with challenging obstacle courses designed to test robots and drones. Robotics and engineering students are putting Valkyrie's skills to the test and have further developed its capabilities. The robot's ultimate Mars test will take place this summer when 20 teams will compete for a $1 million prize in NASA's Space Robotics Challenge, designed to place Valkyrie in a Martian disaster scenario.

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 the ultimate goal is to you know go to planets like Mars which are really far away before you get there you obviously need habitats and things for you know the astronauts to live in so the idea is to send these robots to help set those things up and then once the astronauts arrive why not use the robots to further assist going out in space obviously puts

    00:00:23 risk on human so if we can send a robot out there to do that instead we you know help lower the risk on human lives can you take us a little bit of through uh through her functionality what she does yeah so she um is 32 degrees of freedom not including her hands which she currently doesn't have on her uh she can walk she can manipulate things she has the multi-ense

    00:00:47 um SL which is in her head so she can able to sense the world around her and you know figure out what she needs to do you have a pair of stereo cams in her chest right there additionally that helps bring more 3D data and just a different viewpoint you have you know her two arms which currently what's on her are her mass simulator so these are not her hands obviously these are just

    00:01:09 uh dummies nas is currently working on them and fixing them for us and then we also have you know her legs and then she can walk are there advantages to having a a a bipeal robot versus one with wheels or one with nonhuman mo movement so every researcher you ask is going to give you a different answer to that we live in this environment and we build this environment you know for us so the

    00:01:31 idea to mimic us is you know that we work the best in our environment so wouldn't a robot also work the best right [Music] she got mad at us she did so NASA they developed four of these four of the the Valkyries yes they've built four of them and uh the idea is to kind of outsource some of the project to to uh to

    00:01:55 universities they've done all the hardware stuff and we are just developing these highle capabilities uh for them so that way you know Valkyrie does more than just simply move limbs she can actually autonomously make decisions and you know move around to accomplish task that we want her to so everything we use her for is really you know with that in mind i mean my

    00:02:18 personal idea is that I want a robot in a home one day so um all those capabilities both apply to space and home a lot often so So you you potentially see some of the the the things that your team is learning trickling down into the consumer space for example definitely i mean you know a lot of the research that we look at are like we're

    00:02:39 looking at like footstep planning so how do we get this humanoid robot from you know point A to point B while like you know avoiding obstacles and making sure you know she's stepping in locations that she can actually you know step and balance on and things we also look at you know doing whole body control so figuring out you know she sees that there's a box on a table you know how do

    00:03:00 you uh work her joint so that she's able to put her hands on each side of the box and then pick up that box to move it around you could easily apply that to the home or a space and so we see that a lot of what we do goes to both domains [Music] i'm just I'm wondering if there's an advantage to when we go to you know a foreign world um having a robot that

    00:03:29 looks like us having having something that's familiar i mean so I definitely think so i mean for me personally I definitely personify Valkyrie i mean I talk to her you know she's a human and definitely some people might find that a little weird but I mean I think a lot of people do like relate to that i think you know you can definitely see that when people come and you know see her

    00:03:50 and things that they you know recognize her as almost humanlike and and I think sometimes that can make interaction easier what's what's the plan as far what's their plan for actually bringing these into space you know how how far out are we at this point um we're probably quite a few years out um I'm definitely not the person to ask but she'll never get to space unfortunately

    00:04:11 uh this platform but the idea is that you know one day a future version of her will get there and so we are mainly focused on just developing capabilities for humanoid robots so that one day when that platform is ready it will also be ready or equipped with these autonomous capabilities [Music]