Moonwalk With an ‘Imagery’ Friend
Students Designing Virtual Astronaut Assistant for NASA Competition
Illustration by Shutterstock
A UMD student group is designing a virtual robot avatar that would appear in a display built into an astronaut's helmet to assist with lunar exploration. Their design will go head-to-head with those of other student groups next month in a NASA-sponsored competition.
The United States plans to return people to the moon in 2024, and if a University of Maryland student club has its way, astronauts from NASA’s Artemis program won’t be exploring the stark lunar landscapes alone—not exactly, anyway.
Members of the XR Club, which focuses on virtual and augmented (or “mixed”) reality, have designed a virtual robot assistant that would exist only in an astronaut helmet’s heads-up display, where it could provide information to assist with tasks ranging from navigation to equipment repair. The idea—headed for a NASA-sponsored student showdown—is that an interactive, seemingly embodied helper could be more intuitive to use than a computer-like display.
And if it provides a little entertainment while capering among the craters, that would only be true to its conceptual roots, says senior Sahil Mayenkar, a computer engineering major and president of the XR Club. The design was inspired by Hollywood, starting with the artificial intelligence JARVIS. that’s embedded in Marvel movies protagonist Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit. Visually, the team’s own ARTEMIS (Augmented Reality Trusty Extraterrestrial Mission-ready Intelligent Sidekick) is based on the angelic EVE robot in the Pixar film “Wall-E.”
“Mixed reality allows us to bring characters to life as something we can see in front of ourselves and interact with, and it doesn’t take up a ton of space or have the complications of an actual robot on the moon,” Mayenkar says.
The team’s adviser is Matthias Zwicker, professor and interim chair in the Department of Computer Science, and an expert in the intersection of artificial intelligence and computer graphics.
“It is exciting to see them using these cutting-edge augmented reality technologies to work on such a fascinating real-world problem,” he said. “There is no doubt that this experience will be a huge asset for the future careers of these students.”
The design is part of a competition—NASA’s Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS) challenge—that will be run virtually in late April by space agency staff at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The space agency is looking to the students for innovative ways to use augmented reality to extend the capabilities of astronauts, something Mayenkar and his teammates practically dream about.
“The idea is if we can bring humans and machines closer together, it can almost give us superpowers.”
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