NASA’s Valkyrie (R5) robot will never slip the surly bonds of Earth. The humanoid space robot is destined to spend the rest of its days on terra firma with..
NASA’s Valkyrie (R5) robot will never slip the surly bonds of Earth. The humanoid space robot is destined to spend the rest of its days on terra firma with the rest of us. But like Robonaut before it , the six-foot, 290-pound piece of machinery represents a link to the future.
She’s a first step toward a goal of human colonization of Mars and beyond, a wonderful dream for a robot currently tethered to the ceiling of a warehouse in snowy Lowell, Massachusetts, an hour’s drive outside of Boston. The Lowell model is one of four units produced by NASA. The space agency held onto one robot for its own purposes and awarded two as research loans to Northeastern University and nearby MIT, while a fourth was acquired by Scotland’s University of Edinburgh.
Northeastern acquired the $2 million robot in 2015, when Electrical & Computer Engineering Professor Taskin Padir penned a proposal outlining a plan to help NASA test the hardware for its Space Robotics Challenge , an open competition designed to help prep Valkryie’s successors prepare for the important task of setting up hostile Martian terrain for human settlement.
“They’ve done all of the hardware and we’re developing these high-level capabilities so Valkyrie does more than just move limbs,” says Northeastern PhD student, Murphy Wonsick. “She can autonomously make decisions, move around and accomplish tasks.”
All told, it’s a pretty ideal arrangement for all parties involved. Northeastern and MIT get access to $2 million state of the art space robots and NASA gets to outsource research for the platform to eager robotics and engineering students.
