Toward deep space humanoid robotics inspired by the NASA Space Robotics Challenge

This paper presents the initial work toward deep space robotic applications. Humanoid robots as astronauts can experience gravity differences, hazardous environmental conditions, extreme latency communications, and lack of energy sources while on deep space missions. Such constraints provide a challenge in the development of software, hardware, and experiments for space humanoid robots. This paper demonstrates the preliminary work for deep space robotics through the two qualification tasks specified by NASA's Space Robotics Challenge. The tasks are implemented in both the SRC simulator using IHMC ROS APIs, and with a physical humanoid robot, DRC-Hubo. The main objective is to testify the fundamental vision capability and maneuverability for deep space missions. This paper serves as a reference for future research in the field of deep space robotics.