NASA auditions robots for lunar missions

Since mounting Robonaut on a wheeled platform and renaming him Centaur after the half man/half-horse of Greek mythology, NASA has devoted more attention to thinking about how the dexterous robot might help build and maintain outposts on the Moon. Culbert said a robot like Centaur might make an excellent lunar plumber, for example, tackling various pipefitting chores and freeing astronauts to concentrate on more important activities. But Centaur can also do grunt work. In the desert in September, Culbert said, the robot helped the stand-in astronauts unload the Scout rover.

Athlete got its start in late 2004 when NASA was spending relatively freely on human and robotic technology projects that supported a wide mix near and longer-term exploration goals.

NASA initially planned to spend $25 million on Athlete over four years. But after NASA Administrator Mike Griffin took over in early 2005 and decided the agency could not afford the $1 billion-a-year technology portfolio his predecessor had set in motion, all but 38 of the original 118 competitively-selected projects were canceled. Athlete made the cut, but had its funding reduced substantially. After receiving $3 million in its first year, Athlete’s funding was paired back to $1.5 million.

Brian Wilcox, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-based principle investigator for Athlete, said the funding reduction ruled out building a high-fidelity prototype out of mission-grade components as the team originally proposed. But the team has managed to build three somewhat lower fidelity Athlete prototypes, including two fully-functional vehicles, from commercially-available components. The semi-autonomous rovers run software brought over from the Mars Exploration Rover program.

Wilcox said Athlete is first and foremost a versatile cargo vehicle that has demonstrated its ability to tackle a wide range of tasks and terrain challenges, including climbing hills and rappelling into ravines.

Athlete also would make a great set of landing legs for NASA’s next human lunar lander, Wilcox said. “We have been promoting the concept that Athlete would make superb landing legs for the [Lunar Surface Access Module],” he said. “It would give the first lander superb mobility as well as a general purpose manipulator, so it would have the ability to do self maintenance.”

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