NASA announces competition to improve Robonaut's sight

NASA's got some of the sharpest minds in the world (actual, you know, rocket scientists), sure, but they'll be the first to tell you that sometimes you've got to look outside for the best solution to a complicated problem. In recent years, that's meant the organization has partnered with the likes of SpaceX to help transfer materials to the International Space Station. The desire to look outside has also taken the form of competitions, which, in the past, have sought to improve the efficiency of solar arrays and help better understand the massive amounts of data collected from various missions over a 30-year period.

This latest competition, a partnership with TopCoder, deals with the unspeakably appealing category of space robots, aiming to improve the vision of NASA's head of menial space station tasks, Robonaut. At present, the 'bot's got the sort of sight problems that would have no doubt barred its fleshier counterparts from making their way through the training program.

"We've already set something up, but it didn't work great, because it was pretty brittle," says NASA robotics engineer Julia Badger of Robonaut's vision. "It wasn't a great solution for being able to do it with the lab lighting conditions on Earth, and then the different cameras and lighting conditions and radiation on the space station. So that's why we're open-sourcing this. We want to know what people want to know out there and how they can solve the problem."

The competition centers around helping the robot determine the state and location of buttons and switches located on a taskboard by identifying their corresponding LEDs. It's a real problem for which NASA has yet to find an elegant solution -- so the organization has decided to look outward. "Whenever you can bring in non-domain experts to a problem that you have, you have a higher likelihood of getting more valuable solutions and approaches that haven't been thought of," explains NASA's Director of Advanced Exploration Systems, Jason Crusan. "If you stick with the normal players -- even if they are experts -- you often stick to your old ways and don't think of new ways to look at the problem."

It's not, he adds, a competition simply for the sake of competition. "We don't run challenges for the purpose of outreach or just to see if we can get a neat solution. If we're going to run a challenge and it's successful, the idea is that it should be easily integrated into the project."