Collaborative and Educational Crowdsourcing of Spaceflight Software using SPHERES Zero Robotics

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is being researched as a problem-solving technique by issuing open calls for solutions to large crowds of people with the incentive of prizes. This paper tackles the dual objectives of building cluster flight software and educating students using collaborative competition, both in virtual simulation environments and on real hardware in space. The concept is demonstrated using the SPHERES Zero Robotics Program, a robotics programming competition where the robots are nano-satellites called SPHERES onboard the International Space Station (ISS), traditionally used as a Guidance, Navigation and Control testbed in microgravity. Zero Robotics allows students to program SPHERES to play a game through a web-based interface and the most robust projects are evaluated on the ISS hardware, supervised by astronauts. The apparatus to investigate the influence of collaboration was developed by (1) building new web infrastructure where intensive inter-participant collaboration is possible, (2) designing a game that incentivizes collaboration with opponents, to solve a relevant formation flight problem and (3) structuring a tournament such that inter-team collaboration is mandated. The web infrastructure was also built using collaborative competitions, to demonstrate feasibility of building space software end-to-end by crowdsourcing.