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National Aeronautics and Space Administration
About
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the civil space agency of the United States, operating since 1 October 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its humanoid robotics work concentrated at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. That work runs through two platforms. Robonaut 2, developed jointly with General Motors, was unveiled in 2010 and became the first humanoid robot to reach space when it flew to the International Space Station in 2011. Valkyrie, officially designated R5, was unveiled on 10 December 2013 and came directly out of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a programme launched in response to the Fukushima disaster caused by the Japanese tsunami. Valkyrie was designed and built in about nine months by a Johnson Space Center team led by Nicolaus Radford in partnership with the University of Texas and Texas A&M, is named after female figures in Norse mythology, and is described by NASA as a robust, rugged, entirely electric humanoid robot capable of operating in degraded or damaged human-engineered environments. It is not a product but a research platform: in 2016 NASA awarded Valkyrie robots to three robotics laboratories, at MIT, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell working with Northeastern University, and at the University of Edinburgh, to develop the robot's capabilities, and it has also been used under a reimbursable Space Act Agreement with Woodside Energy in Perth, Western Australia, to develop remote mobile dexterous manipulation for the caretaking of uncrewed and hazardous facilities such as offshore platforms. NASA frames the purpose around the same problem: facilities built for people to operate with levers, switches, dials and doors, where no people are present because the site is uncrewed or dangerous, and eventually the upkeep of a Martian base while astronauts are away. The agency has also announced collaborative agreements with companies around the world to bring its humanoid expertise into industry, and its dexterous robotics group works on manipulation generally, including the RoboGlove developed with General Motors, a wearable device that lets a user grip tools for longer without muscle fatigue.
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