• Bill Ingalls / NASA

    Members of the University of Waterloo Robotics Team from Canada test their robot on the practice field during the NASA-WPI Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge at Worcester Polytechnic Institute on Worcester, Mass. None of the teams in the competition won the $1.5 million prize money for autonomous robots, and the money will be carried forward to the next challenge.

    No bot wins robot challenge

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Not all missions are successful, and such was the case for last weekend's $1.5 million Sample Return Robot Challenge, backed by NASA and presented at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. The robo-showdown was supposed to pit autonomous rovers against each other in a race to roll around a course, collect samples and return them back to base, using the sorts of technologies that would be available to interplanetary robots. That means no GPS, no compass, no Internet.

    Eleven teams registered for the competition, and six showed up in Worcester — but none of the teams could collect a sample during an official run. "Hopefully, all the teams will continue to improve their robotic systems and return to participate in future NASA Centennial Challenges," NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck said in a press-release postmortem.

    Other challenges:

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • $1.5 million NASA rover contest set for robo-showdown in June

    NASA / JPL-Caltech

    An artist's conception shows NASA's Curiosity rover zapping a rock during a sampling operation on Mars. Laser-zapping is not a requirement for the robots entered in a NASA-backed $1.5 million contest.

    By Devin Coldewey

    Mark June 16 on your calendar, interplanetary robot fans: That’s when autonomous rovers will face off in NASA's $1.5 million Sample Return Robot Challenge at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

    The challenge, one of several that NASA is sponsoring, was announced back in July 2010 — but a purpose-built autonomous robot isn't a simple thing to create, so it has taken nearly two years to collect and vet the entrants.

    The challenge, in brief, is to create a compact (1.5 cubic meters, 175 pounds) robot that can navigate varied terrain, find and collect certain items, and return them safely to the base. But it must do this without the use of GPS or any "Earth-based" systems, such as a compass or Internet connection, which naturally would not be available on celestial bodies other than our own. Furthermore, the robot can't use air cooling, ultrasonic rangefinders or a number of other techniques that wouldn't be workable in an airless environment.

    There are both private and public teams: Groups from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Waterloo  have both made the final 11, and the rest are start-up companies such as SpacePRIDE from South Carolina and True Vision Robotics from Atascadero, Calif. Six of the teams are based in California, while the rest are scattered around the US and Canada.

    The teams' robots will be unmanned and on their own once deployed, but they won't be going in completely blind. As would likely be the case on a real planetary mission, NASA is providing satellite imagery of the area, compete with topographic information and points of interest:

    NASA / WPI

    Topographic map of the competition's terrain

    The first phase of the challenge is a qualifying round, in which robots must retrieve a single sample within a quarter of an hour. Teams that succeed will be admitted to the second phase, the real challenge. There will be 10 samples in the vicinity, and a robot will have just two hours to collect as many as it can and return to a designated point. The prize money will be divvied up based on how the rovers perform this second task.

    A powerful and reliable sample-return robot will be a critical part of future robotic planetary missions. NASA has also set up competitions for other important parts of such endeavors, such as wireless power systems and digging mechanisms. Such research is readily adaptable to terrestrial applications such as disaster response and automated industry.

    WPI will be hosting the event on their campus in Massachusetts on June 14-18, with the competition beginning in earnest on June 16. NASA's deputy administrator, Lori Garver, and chief technologist Mason Peck will be on hand for the awards ceremony.

    Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

  • Tethers tortured in $2 million contest

    Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

    Tether Addicts team member Gilberto Brambilla, center, pumps up the pressure on a "tether torture rack" during today's Strong Tether Challenge. Contest organizer Ben Shelef looks on at left, while Ted Semon and Maurice Franklin are seated at right. The tether, held in place on the right side of the rack, snapped shortly after this photo was taken.

    Three teams brought lengths of string to the Strong Tether Challenge today in hopes of winning as much as $2 million of NASA's money. But they all went away empty-handed ... except for the shreds of carbon nanotubes and glass fiber they had to pick up off the floor.

    This year's challenge, organized by the California-based Spaceward Foundation, was conducted in conjunction with the 2010 Space Elevator Conference on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.) The aim of the contest is to promote the development of lightweight materials that can outperform the strongest fibers available today.

    Eventually, such materials could be used in the construction of space elevators, "railways" that reach tens of thousands of miles into the sky. But there are more immediate applications for ultra-strong, ultra-light materials: to make stronger ropes, better bulletproof vests and body armor, lighter and hence more fuel-efficient cars and airplanes, and hardier spacecraft.

    NASA has been putting up the prize money for the Strong Tether Challenge since 2005. Five other NASA-backed Centennial Challenges - for prototype lunar landers, moondirt-digging robots, astronaut gloves, innovations in aviation and beam-power systems - have all produced winners. But no one in the tether contest has won a dime yet.

    "This is probably the hardest challenge of all the challenges out there, because it's so fundamental to materials science," Spaceward's Ben Shelef, who has run the contest from its inception, told the 30 onlookers who assembled to watch the competition.

    The Strong Tether Challenge is structured as a tug-of-war, matching lengths of experimental fiber against a heavier woven loop of Zylon fiber on what's known as a "tether torture rack," If the Zylon breaks first, then the challenging team wins a prize. But that's easier said than done. A single strand of Zylon looks like dental floss - but when I tried to wrench it apart with my hands, it ended up cutting my finger instead.

    "If any one of these tethers beats this [Zylon] tether, we can pack up and go home, because we're starting to build a space elevator," Shelef said.

    The standard to beat is quantified in terms of gigapascals per gram per cubic centimeter, or GPa/(g/cc), a measure that wraps the lightweight factor and the strength factor into one scale. This unit of measure, which is also equivalent to one N/Tex, is so useful when it comes to judging material strength that Shelef has proposed a new standard measure called the "yuri," in honor of space-elevator theorist Yuri Artsutanov. One GPa/(g/cc) or N/Tex is equal to a megayuri, and it takes 5 megayuris to win a prize.

    The $2 million purse is structured with a sliding scale, based on the tether's length and mass. One of the teams entered in today's competition, the Tether Addicts from Florida (Gilberto Brambilla and Bruce Klappauf) theoretically could have won the whole shebang. The other two entrants, Bryan Laubscher and Christopher Cooper, could have won $300,000 to $600,000, depending on the combination of winning outcomes.

    Calculating the potential permutations would have been an empty exercise, however, because none of the challengers came close to hitting the 5-megayuri mark. All of the fibers broke after just a few strokes of the hydraulic hand pump on the tether torture rack. The most spectacular sproing came during the final test, when pressure was put on the Tether Addicts' meter-long entry, woven from glass fibers that were coated with carbon nanotubes.

    Brambilla told me that he and Klappauf had a length of fiber in their lab that could have won the prize - but that a cleaning crew accidentally threw that fiber in the trash. "It ended up in the vacuum cleaner," he said ruefully. The replacement fiber had to be made in a rush, and Brambilla wasn't all that happy with the result.

    The Tether Addicts took time off from their day jobs at an optics lab to work on this year's entry, and Brambilla wasn't sure whether he could keep feeding the addiction. "You can't really justify working on this subject if you don't have the money," he told me. But Shelef was betting that at least one or two of this year's contestants would be back for the next tug-of-war in 2011.

    "That wraps it up this year," Shelef declared after the last tether was torn. "Better luck next year."

    For more about today's contest and the weekend schedule for the Space Elevator Conference, check out Ted Semon's Space Elevator Blog. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter with @b0yle. If you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."