SRW Overview and Latest News

 

The MIT Space Resources Workshop (SRW) is an interdisciplinary collaboration hub supporting student co-curricular projects which enable humans to one day live on the Moon and Mars. SRW is open to MIT students from all backgrounds, courses and programs, and is jointly managed by the Engineering Systems Lab and the Human Systems Lab at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Funding for our activities comes from selection as finalists in NASA-sponsored competitions such as the Centennial Challenge, the Lunar Autonomy Challenge, the Human Lander Challenge and the RASC-AL Forum. Past challenges included BIG Idea Challenge and RASC-AL Special Edition. 

RECENT UPDATES FROM SRW NASA CHALLENGES TEAMS

The successors to the MELTTT deployable lunar tower team (from BIG Idea 2020) are working on a second-generation tower in collaboration with NASA Langley. Two undergraduate students recently completed a summer internship at NASA where they developed and tested a new stabilization system for the tower.
Our MARTEMIS team received the Best in Theme: Long-Duration Mars Simulation at the Moon award at the 2024 NASA RASC-AL Forum, at Cocoa Beach Florida, in June 2024.
The WORMS team, recipients of Best Paper awards at the 2022 NASA BIG Idea Challenge and at the 2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference, were invited by Jeff Bezos to demonstrate their reconfigurable lunar robot prototype at his annual Amazon MARS event which took place in California in March 2024.
MIT's 2023 NASA BIG Idea Challenge team, ARTEMIS Steelworks, was a finalist in the Lunar Forge challenge. The team designed, built and tested a Molten Regolith Electrolysis proof of concept system to produce steel from lunar regolith simulant (proposal video) and presented their results at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio in November, 2023.
Our 2023 NASA RASC-AL Pale Red Dot team received the First Place Overall and Best in Theme: Homesteading Mars awards at the NASA's 2023 RASC-AL Forum. The team designed a crewed human exploration architecture of Mars that can enable astronauts to survive there for at least 7 years with minimal support from Earth. The concept is a polis-based architecture for the long-term exploration of the Red planet, with exciting and diverse developmental opportunities to thrive. Details are available in the project page.

BART & MARGE Wins First Place Overall and Best in Theme at NASA's RASC-AL Forum (11 Jul 2022)

The Bipropellant All-in-one isRu Truck & Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity (BART & MARGE) is a fully mobile, fully integrated and double-fault-tolerant architecture to produce large quantities of cryogenic methalox propellant on Mars from in-situ subsurface glacial ice deposits and atmospheric carbon dioxide. The concept is based on tandems of two large trucks which are free to produce and liquefy propellant in situ with no fixed centralized infrastructure. The final paper was presented at NASA's RASC-AL Forum that took place from June 20-23, 2022, at Cocoa Beach, FL, with student travel funded by NASA. The team won First Place Overall and Best In Theme (NASA feature story, MIT News story), and received a travel stipend award to present their work at the ASCEND 2022 aerospace conference which will take place from 24-26 October at Las Vegas. The BART & MARGE concept (project page, video) was created by a team of undergraduate and graduate AeroAstro, EECS, Mathematics and Medical Engineering students with mentorship from our SRW founders and faculty advisors.

WORMS Awarded Best Technical Paper at NASA's BIG Idea Challenge (17 Nov 2022)

Our workshop's team and project, the Walking, Oligomeric, Robotic Mobility System (WORMS - project page, proposal video, project overview video) received the  Best Technical Paper award at NASA's 2022 BIG Idea Challenge. The team was selected as a finalist in February 2022, carried out detailed design and procurement in the Spring, and built the components over the summer and completed 14 integrated tests during the Fall. WORMS is a modular architecture for the rapid assembly of effectively unlimited variants of extreme terrain access and tailored heavy-duty robots. Robot configurations specialized to the task at hand can be rapidly reconfigured in the field out of worm-like robots that can function as arms, legs, backbones and much more. 

 

Critical innovations include the Universal Interface Block which permits rigid coupling and electrical power transfer between architecture elements, and the Species Modules which confer special skills to individual worms, enabling the emergence of higher level functions through the synergistic, symbiotic collaboration of different worm species in a robot configuration. Each new robot configuration requires only new software plus a small number of existing worms and accessories which can be repurposed from existing, no-longer-needed configurations. As long as the software exists in the code library and the necessary worms and accessories are at hand, any library robot configuration can be assembled by a non-specialist in a matter of hours or minutes and assigned to its task. The architecture is designed to be resilient, easily maintainable, low-cost, evolvable, versatile, flexible and future-proof. 

Following WORMS's selection as a finalist in NASA's 2022 BIG Idea Challenge, our team built and demonstrated a proof-of-concept hexapod configuration in November 2022 focusing on the maturation of three key enabling technologies, the Universal Interface Block (UIB), power-sharing and coordination of operations between the six independent Worm robots.