Navigating the Moon

When Carnegie Mellon University's Team Resnik arrived in Houston, they reveled in the excitement of being at NASA's Johnson Space Center. But then in true CMU fashion, they quickly got to work. They had an autonomous driving system to test before they could find a lost lunar terrain vehicle as part of the 2026 NASA Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS) Challenge.Held annually, NASA SUITS encourages student teams to develop user interface solutions for future spaceflight needs. This year's CMU team, named in honor of College of Engineering alumna and second American woman in space Judith Resnik, was one of 10 invited to Houston to test their tool at the Johnson Space Center. (Tragically, Resnik died in the Challenger disaster in 1986.)Team Resnik aimed to reduce an astronaut's cognitive load while using a lunar rover — meaning they wanted to make it easier for astronauts to stay alert and safe while operating the rover. While CMU has participated in NASA SUITS before, team lead Maggie Chen said this felt like an entirely new endeavor because they were starting from scratch.CMU's Team Resnik was one of 10 groups invited to the Johnson Space Center to test the autonomous driving tool they developed as part of the NASA SUITS Challenge."This whole experience was exciting and rewarding for me personally," said Chen, a junior in the School of Computer Science (SCS). "We built this whole thing from basically nothing because the previous team, Moon Buddy, worked on the spacesuit and we were creating something for the lunar rover. This whole experience started with an idea, then we had to determine how to make it happen and finally we saw NASA engineers using it. It was amazing."CMU's Moon Buddy project was the university's previous teams that competed in the NASA SUITS challenge. Most recently, in 2022, the team incorporated voice controls into an augmented reality interface to assist astronauts during moon walks.According to team member Christian Ang, a senior in the Mellon College of Science, Team Resnik didn't simply design a user interface — they built a real tool that worked. CMU's team created an autonomous driving system for the lunar rover that could predict the lunar surface and help astronauts navigate to a lost lunar vehicle. On top of that, they built an AI voice assistant for the rover.The idea to build real tools that help astronauts in dangerous and harsh conditions came from lunch with Jay Apt, a former NASA astronaut and professor emeritus in the Tepper School of Business."One thing Jay said that stuck with us is that astronauts don't know the lunar terrain and that's scary," Ang said. "So we decided to build something that could predict what they are driving into. We realized how frightening it must be to be driving and suddenly — surprise! — there's a hole in the ground. Jay also told us to make the buttons really big because astronauts wear gloves, so our buttons are massive."Using existing lunar surface data, Team Resnik constructed a map of known and predicted locations that astronauts might encounter. Then the team incorporated real-time LIDAR data from the rover to update and improve the map and ultimately predict the safest path. Finally, this data all fed into an automatic driving pipeline that determined the straightest possible route to a lost lunar terrain vehicle while avoiding dangerous obstacles. The AI voice assistant could read out errors or warn the astronaut if something went wrong. Chen said the AI voice assistant was a way to bring only critical details forward to avoid information overwhelm.At the Johnson Space Center, Team Resnik had two field test sessions when they could use their tools to locate a lost lunar vehicle. The first session didn't go to plan, but the team improved and ultimately, in the last two minutes of their final 30-minute session, successfully located the lost vehicle."The success during the second test night showed how far they had come from an idea on a whiteboard to a real working prototype tested with the people building the future of space missions," said Nikolas Martelaro, an associate professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute and the faculty adviser for Team Resnik. "I hope the team recognizes what they achieved in such a short amount of time and that this experience inspires their future endeavors."Team Resnik's work was given to NASA and could be used for future space missions. Ang said he's extremely proud of what the team accomplished during this challenge and noted that seeing what the other teams came up with kept him humble.As for next year, Ang challenges other CMU students to step up and join the challenge."I want to see more CMU students from across the university take a leap and see this as a learning opportunity," he said. "Don't just stay indoors and study all day. That's not how to learn things in the real world. I want to see more of our students venture out there and put CMU on the map."The Pennsylvania Space Consortium provided a grant to support Team Resnik throughout the challenge. Along with Chen and Ang, the team included CMU undergraduates Parinthapat Pengpun, Daniel Stankiewicz, Serena Cai, Jean Chen, Charlie Ai, Jose Lima, Napat Warasittichai and Hagen Qian.

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