From The Space Review
via ASEE First Bell (June 7, 2011)
In an article for the Space Review (6/6), Ben Brockert of Armadillo Aerospace wrote about the new NASA-funded Centennial Challenge called the Sample Return Robot Challenge, asking participants to design “a fully autonomous robot…to venture around a course collecting pre-defined samples and bringing them back to a platform.” Teams will only have limited information about the course before the completion. Brockert is concerned that teams “must provide a full printout of their robot code along with a schematic of all electrical components” as this could have a “chilling effect” on competitors. Brockert is also worried that environmental conditions are not specified. To him, “time will tell whether the eventual rule set will drive innovation and a variety of approaches, like the regolith excavation challenge, or set up a problem so difficult no one will win, as in the regolith oxygen and strong tether challenges.”