Valkyrie: NASA's First Bipedal Humanoid Robot Nicolaus A. Radford, Philip Strawser, Kimberly Hambuchen, Joshua S. Mehling, William K. Verdeyen, Stuart Donnan, James Holley, Jairo Sanchez, Vienny Nguyen, Lyndon Bridgwater, Reginald Berka, Robert Ambrose∗ NASA Johnson Space Center Christopher McQuin NASA Jet Propulsion Lab John D. Yamokoski Stephen Hart, Raymond Guo Institute of Human Machine Cognition General Motors Adam Parsons, Brian Wightman, Paul Dinh, Barrett Ames, Charles Blakely, Courtney Edmonson, Brett Sommers, Rochelle Rea, Chad Tobler, Heather Bibby Oceaneering Space Systems Brice Howard, Lei Nui, Andrew Lee, David Chesney Robert Platt Jr. Michael Conover, Lily Truong Wyle Laboratories Northeastern University Jacobs Engineering Gwendolyn Johnson, Chien-Liang Fok, Eric Cousineau, Ryan Sinnet, Nicholas Paine, Luis Sentis Jordan Lack, Matthew Powell, University of Texas Austin Benjamin Morris, Aaron Ames Texas A&M University ∗Due to the large number of contributors toward this work, email addresses and physical addresses have been omitted. Please contact Kris Verdeyen from NASA-JSC at
[email protected] with any inquiries. Abstract In December 2013, sixteen teams from around the world gathered at Homestead Speedway near Miami, FL to participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials, an aggressive robotics competition, partly inspired by the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor incident. While the focus of the DRC Trials is to advance robotics for use in austere and inhospitable environments, the objectives of the DRC are to progress the areas of supervised autonomy and mobile manipulation for everyday robotics. NASA's Johnson Space Center led a team comprised of numerous partners to develop Valkyrie, NASA's first bipedal humanoid robot.