In a windy patch of desert outside Barstow, Calif., a 700-pound planetary rover named Helelani is churning its thick tires through a flour-like dust. Seven teams from around the world are taking turns steering this dune-buggy-like rover through the course. And as the rover weaves through a slalom course of cones, NASA technologist Rob Mueller explains that this silty dry lakebed is a pretty good analog for adventures on another planet.
"It's an extreme environment. That's why we're here," Mueller says. "It's blowing dust. It gets hot in the day, cold at night. We even have dust devils, small tornadoes coming through once in a while. So it's very Mars-like."
Mueller is outfitted in a heavy tan work jacket and a NASA baseball cap, and though it's bitterly cold and windy for us humans, he says the robots don't mind. Even if they did, pushing them to their limits is the whole point.
"The unexpected happens out here – dust jamming into a mechanism is not going to happen in a lab," he says. "We want to break the robots many times. Fix them, run them again. By the time they get to the moon and Mars, they'll work."
This rover race is part of a new festival Mueller dreamed up called RoboPalooza. It has some of the trappings of other desert festivals, like live rock bands, food trucks and portable toilets. The difference here is that this one is sponsored in part by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – and it's focused on building a future for humanity in space. So the star performers at this festival are not musicians, but space robots and the people who spend their lives building them.
In the exhibit area, the company Astrolab is showing off its squishy all-metal tire, meant for roving on the moon. The company's business development manager, Kelly Randell, explains that the tire is intended to conform to the moon's surface, to hug the lunar dirt – and it's missing the inflatable rubber part for a reason.
"There's no AAA on the moon," she says. "So if we pop a tire on our rover, we can't just go fix it."
Nearby, the University of Alabama Astrobotics team is demonstrating what a robot nicknamed "Turbo" can do. It's about the size of a large dog with four metal wheels and built to dig moondust. As it lowers its digger head to the ground – essentially a conveyor belt of tiny buckets – it excavates a small hole and dumps a pile of powder behind the rover.
"Turbo was designed to collect a bunch of moon dirt and drive around and build a berm, which is basically just a big pile of dirt," team member Randie Jo Evans said.
This, on a much larger scale, might someday be the way space agencies and private companies build structures for astronauts on the moon – and beyond.
"There's massive radiation in space that will give you cancer," Mueller says. "So we need shelter, we need radiation shielding."
Mueller imagines that in the not-too-distant future, the moon will be a rest stop – a sort of gas station in space – as people travel from the Earth to Mars and the asteroid belt. Some people may just stop by the moon, but others, he says, will want to work and play there. "Imagine playing basketball on the moon," he says.
But someone has to build the basketball courts, the roads and the housing. Mueller says that's where the robots come in – swarms of them.
"The robots will build the infrastructure," he says. "They are good at building infrastructure. They don't complain. They work 24 hours a day."
Robots can also be built to withstand the damaging radiation in space. The problem is, the space robots we have today are slow — incredibly slow. NASA's Opportunity rover, which has traveled farther than any other rover on Mars, rolled about 28 miles over roughly 14 years. Average it out, and that's a ground speed of about 2 miles per year.
Or, as Mueller puts it: "They literally drive at a snail's pace."
And if a snail were to race one of NASA's science rovers, Mueller guesses the snail would win – because it doesn't need to wait for instructions.
"The robot needs instructions from people. The crew in mission control sends instructions to the robot, and there's a time delay on Mars…up to 40 minutes," he added.
Long distances in space mean communication delays because information can't travel faster than the speed of light. For teams controlling robots on Mars, that might mean sending a command one day, waiting for the rover to respond, and sending a new command the next day.
True, Rome wasn't built in a day. But with construction delays like this, it would never have been built.
"You can't do it at a snail's pace," Mueller says. "You have to move faster. But to move faster, you need a higher level of autonomy. And so that's what we're trying to do here in the desert, is test these robots."
In an old trailer near the rover racecourse, a couple of students from Cal Poly Pomona are hunched over their laptops, sending commands to the Helelani rover. They can't even see the racecourse from where they're seated inside a trailer, relying solely on live video feeds from the rover to steer it through the dust. It's slow work, and the rover travels in fits and starts. It takes a while for the team to figure out where to go next and to transmit a new command to the rover. The team's halting progress demonstrates the types of delays that would hinder construction in space.
But there's a certain magic to this race, too. Six other teams are running the rover through the same race, and they're doing it from thousands of miles away, in places as far as Chile and Australia. After all, if we can control robots in space, why not try to control them from the other side of the planet? It's the team from Western Australia that wins the competition, with a finishing time of 20 minutes 10 seconds.
They're getting a $5,000 prize for their effort. But the lessons for the engineering community – and the insights about designing more autonomous machines – might be worth more.
"Giving the rover the opportunity to go off on a longer leash is scary," says Brad Dixon, an engineer from the winning team. "But the more this becomes popular —when people are familiar with controls and hazards — those risks become smaller."
As a local rock band blares on at the stage, half-drowned out by the desert wind and the hum of generators, Mueller leans back against an old RV – his home for the last few days – and gazes at the desert. Even as a space evangelist, he says he won't be the first in line to make a home in space.
"I don't really want to live on the moon," he says. "I love this blue planet, this pale blue dot. It's just so beautiful." But he says humanity's motivations are different.
"It's our human spirit to be explorers," Mueller says. "We don't know why we're going or what will happen. That's why we go. If we did know, we wouldn't have to go."
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