NASA
announced two new cash prizes Friday, each with a weighty $250,000 purse, in a
pair of contests aimed at developing robotic systems for space exploration.
The space
agency is challenging innovators to build an autonomous aerial vehicle to navigate
a tricky flight path or robots capable of building complex structures with only
limited guidance from their human handlers, NASA officials said.
The
contests - dubbed the Planetary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Telerobotic Construction
challenges, respectively - are part of the agency's Centennial
Challenges program to spur interest in commercializing space technologies.
Both challenges will make their competitive debut in 2007, NASA officials said.
"The Telerobotic
Construction Challenge is directly linked to NASA's focus on lunar exploration,"
said Brant Sponberg, NASA's Centennial Challenges program manager, in a
statement.
Meanwhile,
the aerial vehicle challenge may yield the same type of probes that could one
day soar through the atmospheres of Mars and the Saturnian moon Titan,
NASA officials said.
A
challenging year
NASA has announced
a series of new Centennial Challenges this year, including contests to develop
systems for new astronaut gloves, suborbital
vehicles and devices to excavate and pull oxygen
from Moon dirt.
The program
also held its first actual competitions in October during the 2005
Beam Power and Tether Centennial Challenges, which drew 11 teams to compete
in two events for a pair of $50,000 first prizes. Both awards went unclaimed,
but NASA has promised larger cash prizes for the 2006 meet.
"Based on
our experiences with the Beam Power and Tether Centennial Challenges, we
anticipate a broad variety of participants, ideas and real hardware for this
competition," Sponberg said of the aerial vehicle contest.
In order to
nab top billing in the Planetary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Challenge, entries
must be fly using visual navigation systems only - Global Positioning Systems
(GPS) aren't allowed - as well as extend and retract a probe to hit multiple
ground targets, they added.
The
California Space Education and Workforce Institute, of Santa Maria, California,
is working with NASA in the competition.
NASA is also
partnering with the Mountain View, California-based firm Spaceward Foundation -
which organized the beam power and tether contest for the space agency - for
its the Telerobotic Construction Challenge.
While contest
rules will be finalized in 2006, event planners expect competitors to use
robots to assemble structures from materials scattered across an arena. The
need for cooperative robots and a time delay similar to that in Earth-Moon
communications will complicate the task, NASA officials said.
The first
Telerobotic Construction challenge is slated for August 2007, with the aerial
vehicle contest to follow in October of that year, NASA officials said.
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