Valkyrie stands more than six
feet tall, weighs 286 pounds, and has an 80 inch wingspan. Designed at the NASA
Johnson Space Center (JSC), Valkyrie competed in the DARPA Robotics Challenge
(DRC) trial round in December 2013, with hopes of one day setting foot on Mars.
Drawing on a heritage of building humanoid robots, the JSC team had to overcome
many challenges throughout the process – primarily, dealing with gravity.
To begin the design of this
complex machine, the team started with paper sketches, designing a number of
different configurations. However, because of the funding constraints and time
restrictions (and a government furlough mid-project) the team didn’t prototype.
Instead, Valkyrie was built up joint by joint. Working in parallel with the
hardware team, the software was developed separately from the beginning, not
phased with the physical robot until the end.
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