Preparation for robot engagement during the MDRS mission.
Pawel Sawicki (BioMedEngr MS’22, AeroEngr PhD’23) explores the arid landscape of Mars and tests critical new technologies through a unique experiment here on Earth.
Welcome to the Mars Desert Research Station, an “analog” astronaut research center located in the remote Utah desert. Run by the Mars Society, the center offers scientists and engineers the opportunity to test future space experiments without having to make long trips into space.
Sawicki, a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder with master’s and doctorate degrees, recently returned from the base, where he spent two weeks as mission commander with a six-member crew. The team lived and worked in conditions strikingly similar to those NASA astronauts will face on the Red Planet.
“It was really exciting. We were living on the station and to go out we had to wear EVA suits,” Sawicki said. “We’re simulating life on Mars so we can learn how to design experiments, equipment and operations for when astronauts actually face that challenge.”
In addition to a series of geological and nuclear experiments, a 30-pound, four-wheeled ground robot was provided by Nisar Ahmed, associate professor of aerospace at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Robots will be important in future Mars missions, but only if users can easily understand their capabilities and limitations, said Nick Conlon, one of Ahmed’s doctoral students in the Ann and HJ Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Science.
Ahmed’s lab is focused on developing methods that allow a robot to accurately tell operators how well it will perform a task. Called Factorized Machine Self-Confidence, the system will give users a simple way to assess the robot’s skills.
“The goal was to use the robot to autonomously take videos in different areas to create a 360-degree view of the environment, like Google Maps Street View,” Conlon said. “Before the robot starts a task, it analyzes its internal models to see if it can achieve the goal. Can it get to a certain area, does it have enough battery to get back, can it avoid obstacles? Things like that.”
Conlon delivered the robot to MDRS and demonstrated the technology before the analog mission began.
Although astronauts are likely to be highly skilled in using their equipment, the goal of this robotics research is to enable regular users to use the technology without too much difficulty.
“People have different ideas about what a robot might be capable of,” Conlon said. “We don’t want people to trust a piece of equipment and break it, hurt themselves or drive it off a cliff. We don’t want people to trust it and let it sit in a corner. We want people to use it within its capabilities and want to use it.”
Conlon said much of the research with the robot so far has been conducted in controlled environments, making Sawicki’s MDRS mission a unique deployment opportunity.
“We’re going to write a paper on everything we learned from this experiment,” Sawicki said. “One of the key takeaways is how to make the system extremely robust for a field study, taking it on an EVA and wearing a spacesuit in the process.”
Although there were some diagnostic issues early on, the robot was able to complete all of the requested site surveys, and Conlon and Sawicki hope the data will be useful for future MDRS missions.
One of the unique challenges that future Mars astronauts will face is communicating with their home planet. Due to the considerable distance between the Red Planet and Earth, one-way transmissions have a minimum delay of 8 to 10 minutes. This makes any live call impossible. The same restrictions are imposed on analog astronauts.
“The isolation was definitely a mental challenge. Nick was back in Colorado and when I had to work with him on a problem with the robot, there were no phone calls and we couldn’t exchange messages quickly. We just send an email and wait,” Sawicki said.
Participating in an MDRS mission allowed Sawicki to fulfill a goal he had since graduate school. CU Boulder offers a course called Medicine in Space and Surface Environments that takes students to MDRS, but during his doctoral program, Sawicki couldn’t fit it into his schedule.
After graduation, he contacted MDRS to sign up for a mission on his own and they offered him the opportunity to become a mission commander.
“I did my PhD in hypersonics, but I had taken all these bioastronautics courses and they told me I was the perfect candidate for this mission,” Sawicki said. “I learned the trials and tribulations of an isolated mission like this, maintaining crew stability and planning. It was a great learning experience for me and a unique opportunity for Ahmed and Conlon to learn how future astronauts might one day work with and alongside autonomous robots.”
The MDRS 297 mission patch, with team member names and the robot in the lower left.