Meet the team: SpaceHopper

Due to their rough terrain and extremely low gravity, asteroids call for innovative methods of locomotion. SpaceHopper is a legged robot for asteroid exploration. Using its legs SpaceHopper can jump and stabilize itself midair to precisely traverse large spans of terrain.

The robot has three legs and utilizes as controller a neural network which is trained in simulation using deep reinforcement learning. The robot has been built and tested on Earth; however, it has never seen a low gravity environment.

For testing the jumping and reorientation capabilities in low gravity, team SpaceHopper will conduct a Zero-G flight hosted by Novespace. The experiment consists of the robot itself and a release mechanism holding the robot in the middle of the free-floating area. Once the gravity drops to 0, the robot is released and tries to reorientate itself to commanded orientations using only its legs. During a second experiment, the robot will jump off the ground and try to reorientate itself to a commanded position before hitting the net.

With this experiment, the team wants to gain insight into the ability and performance of the reorientation controller and the sim-to-real transfer of the system. Successful tests will advance the development of legged space robots and may impact the way autonomous systems will explore low gravity environment.

If this spiked your interest in the hands-on programmes offered by ESA Academy or if you have an experiment you would like to perform in altered gravity environments, then click here to learn more about the possibilities of performing your investigations at one of the platforms available for student experiments at ESA Academy.