PISCES’ Helelani planetary rover awaits instructions during the IEEE Telepresence Challenge in California’s Mojave Desert.
On November 15, PISCES’ Helelani rover was used as the teleoperated platform for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE’s) “Robopalooza” event. The event was held in Lucerne Valley in California’s Mojave Desert with competitors from Chile, Australia, and the United States.
The PISCES rover was shipped to California by IEEE for the event and testing and check-out were performed at Astrobotic’s Mojave facility by PISCES’ Director of Research Christian Andersen and Engineer Amber Imai-Hong. PISCES provided and set up the infrastructure for the on-site teleoperation and operated the mission control, linking teams from their home bases to Helelani in the Mojave. Power and a RV for on-site mission control operations were provided for PISCES by Robopalooza.
PISCES team (L-R) Amber Imai-Hong and Christian Andersen at Mission Control during Robopalooza.
The IEEE sponsored event consisted of teams from around the globe operating and navigating PISCES’ Helelani rover through a timed obstacle course from their home organizations. Points were awarded based on time and accuracy in navigating the course. The competition highlighted the challenges with teleoperation, the importance of teams with well-defined roles, and the criticality of situational awareness. The winning team, Western Australia Remote Operations (WARO32), competed from their facility in Perth, Australia and took home IEEE’s $5,000 prize for the competition.
The event also showcased demonstrations of a number of robotic systems: Cislune’s excavator “Nostromo”; Honeybee Robotics’ WINE Space Drone; the University of Southern California’s Humanoid and Canine robots; Venturi Astrolab’s Flex Rover; Neuro-Space’s Hiver robots; and the University of Alabama’s Lunabotics Excavator.
Robopalooza was a great opportunity for PISCES that we hope to take part in for years to come. The inaugural event was the brainchild of Robert Mueller, a senior technologist and director of Swampworks at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center who was instrumental in organizing and coordinating the event with the volunteers, sponsors, teams, and the IEEE Telepresence Conference held at Caltech. PISCES would like to extend a special thanks to Connor Luken and Jonathan Slavik from Astrobotic, Eric Franks and Alex Drozda from Cislune, Anna Metke from Space Resource Technologies, and Noah Andersen (Christian Andersen’s son) for their help with troubleshooting, transportation, storage and logistics for Helelani and the event.