A team in the US has won a whopping USD 750,000 prize from NASA for designing a robot that can retrieve samples from challenging terrains, and could help the space agency explore surfaces of planets such as Mars in future missions. After an intense robotics competition, the West Virginia University Mountaineers of Morgantown bagged the largest prize awarded in the five-year run of
NASA’s Sample Return Robot Challenge. The Sample Return Robot Challenge, part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges Programme, aims to encourage innovation in robotics technologies relevant to space exploration and broader applications that benefit life on Earth.
The event brought together tech-savvy citizens, entrepreneurs, educators and students to demonstrate robots that can locate and collect geologic samples from a wide and varied landscape without human control and within a specified time.
The competition, hosted by and held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in the US concluded with an awards ceremony officiated by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and WPI President Laurie A Leshin, during which Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, presented the team with the prize check.
NASA awards US team $750,000 prize for sample-retrieving robot
No comments:
Post a Comment