Valkyrie

NASA

United States

Product Page

Valkyrie, officially R5, is NASA's most advanced space humanoid and the successor in spirit to Robonaut 2, which reached the International Space Station in 2011. It was unveiled on 10 December 2013 as NASA's entry for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a programme created in response to the Fukushima disaster, and it was designed and built in about nine months by a Johnson Space Center team led by Nicolaus Radford with the University of Texas and Texas A&M. NASA describes it as a robust, rugged, entirely electric humanoid robot able to operate in degraded or damaged human-engineered environments, and the reasoning behind it is unusually concrete: facilities are built for people to run with levers, switches, dials and doors, so where nobody is present because a site is uncrewed or dangerous, a robot shaped like a person is the obvious substitute, with the upkeep of a Martian base while astronauts are away as the long-term case. The hardware follows from that brief. Valkyrie stands about 1.88 m and weighs about 136 kg, with 44 degrees of freedom across a 3 degree-of-freedom neck, 4 degree-of-freedom arms, 3 degree-of-freedom wrists, 4 degree-of-freedom hands, a 3 degree-of-freedom torso, 6 degree-of-freedom legs and 2 degree-of-freedom ankles. It runs on a swappable 1.8 kWh dual-voltage battery, which matters because nobody can tether a robot exploring a damaged building, and its motion comes from series-elastic actuation rather than stiff position control, with five rotary and two linear actuators per arm, six actuators per hand, five in each upper leg plus two per ankle and five in the torso. It senses through a Carnegie Robotics Multisense SL in its head plus head, torso and shin cameras, knee lidars and six-axis force-torque sensors in its feet, and it is covered in foam and soft fabric so it is safe to be near. NASA does not sell it: in 2016 it awarded robots to MIT, to the University of Massachusetts Lowell with Northeastern University, and to the University of Edinburgh, and it has used one under a Space Act Agreement with Woodside Energy in Perth to develop remote manipulation for caretaking uncrewed and hazardous facilities such as offshore platforms.