Tokyo Institute of Technology Bags Honour At Kibo Robot Programming Challenge

Team Space Lark, a group of five Tokyo Tech master’s program students, have finished in third place at the global Kibo Robot Programming Challenge (Kibo-RPC) finals, held on October 29.

Kibo-RPC is an international programming contest hosted by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in which participants put their engineering skills to the test using Astrobee, a cube-shaped robot developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The programs submitted for the finals are applied in the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo on the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the Earth. Participants must create a program to carry out missions based on the Astrobee source code published by NASA, and are evaluated based on the degree of mission accomplishment and elapsed time.

The main feature of the 2022 contest was the randomly changing position of the target that had to be illuminated using Astrobee’s laser. In order to achieve a high score, teams were required to direct Astrobee not only to complete its missions quickly, but also to improve laser irradiation accuracy by reading AR tags, locating the center of the target using image recognition technology, and utilizing control algorithms to move the robot to the target position and orientation.

Team Space Lark won the domestic qualifying round in Japan on July 9, and therefore progressed to the in-orbit finals. In the preliminary round, the participating teams competed using a simulator that faithfully simulates the space environment. In the finals, the teams write programs in advance for the Astrobee and run them on the ISS.

Participation in Kibo-RPC is one component of the Space Systems Initiative(External site), a course offered to master’s students in Mechanical Engineering at Tokyo Tech. In 2020, the first year of the competition, Tokyo Tech students performed well despite registering only two weeks before the entry submission deadline. In 2021, the team improved further, finishing second in the national qualifiers just shy of first place. Using knowledge from the experiences of previous participants, the 2022 Tokyo Tech team spent more time on preparations and managed to win the national qualifying round. In the worldwide in-orbit finals, the team actually operated NASA’s Astrobee in the pressurized module of Kibo, finishing in third place.