Welcome to the Purdue-Hongik Team Website
NASA’s vision of the Space Robotics Challenge Phase 2 is seeking to foster the creation or advancement of autonomous capabilities of lunar surface robots. The Space Robotics Challenge (SRC) is part of the NASA Centennial Challenges, which was initiated in 2005 to directly engage the public and seek innovation from diverse and non-traditional sources in the process of advanced technology development. The purpose of the competition is for the competitors’ virtual heterogeneous multi-robot teams to autonomously complete tasks envisioned for a lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) mission. This challenge will require competitors to develop software that allows a virtual team of robotic systems (i.e. virtual robotic team) to operate autonomously to successfully achieve these tasks.
The Space Robotics Challenge Phase 2 is a two-year challenge, and the qualification round was held from March 16, 2020 to September 18, 2020. On January 15, 2021, NASA selected the Purdue-Hongik Team as a qualifying team to advance to the final virtual competition round. The Purdue-Hongik Team is an international collaborative team formed by the research group of Dr. Byung-Cheol Min at Purdue University (SMART Lab) and the research group of Dr. Jonghoek Kim at Hongik University in South Korea. The two research groups have been collaborating for a long time on the topic of robotics and multi-robot systems. The team's mission is to disseminate to society through this competition the theoretical and practical knowledge and skills in multi-robot systems that have been built up through our collaboration, and to further advance new robotic technologies suitable for the space environment.
The final competition will be held from January 25, 2021 to July 23, 2021. The final results will be announced in September 2021. The total prize of the competition is $1 million.