A 3D-printed ExoMy rover modelled after ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover navigates towards a blue ball on Mars-like terrain. This scene took place at ESA Academy’s recent Robotics Workshop, where thirty university students spent four days diving into space robotics at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Lennart Puck, an internal research fellow at ESA’s Planetary Robotics Lab, provided support for the students as they learned to operate the ExoMy rovers. “Robots are a part of our daily work,” he says. “However, the students are from different, non-robotics backgrounds. So, in the workshop, we tried to show them step-by-step how robotic systems work.”

“We started with ExoMy’s hardware system,” Lennart explains. “First the students had to correctly connect the motors and calibrate the system before they could drive the robot around.”

As the workshop progressed, students explored software development, locomotion strategies, and used machine learning to train their rovers in object recognition.

On the last day of the workshop, it was time to take hands off the controllers and let the robots do the work. The assignment: an autonomous exploration mission where the ExoMy rovers were tasked with finding an object of interest – a blue ball – hidden somewhere in the Mars-like terrain.

According to Lennart this assignment mimics some of the challenges a rover faces on Mars. “Direct remote control between Earth and Mars isn’t feasible,” he says. “In the best case, we have around four minutes delay. In the worst case, it’s over twenty minutes each way.” This means that, like the ExoMy robots during their final challenge, the Rosalind Franklin rover must be able to independently navigate and identify objects without direct interaction with a human controller.

In addition to the hands-on experience of operating ExoMy, the workshop also gave students an overview of the field of space robotics, with lectures from various ESA experts and a tour of ESTEC. “We are not just computer engineers, mechanical engineers and electrical engineers,” comments Lennart. “There are many different backgrounds needed in robotics. But the main thing I hope students take away is that working with robots is fun.”

[Image description: This is a photograph of a 3D-printed robot with six wheels. The body of the robot is a black rectangular box with the ESA logo on the side. A wide yellow head with big eyes, a short orange beak, and a green lighting-shaped antenna sits on top of a narrow neck at the front of the robot. The robot is moving down a small incline on an orange carpet and appears to be looking at a blue ball sitting on the carpet. The background is blurred. On the left, a student is holding a remote control and looking towards the robot as other students watch. A small group of students on the right are standing in a small circle. Behind the students sits a large silver cylinder tipped on its side – a model of the Columbus laboratory of the International Space Station. In the back, right corner is a white model of a rocket.]