Penn’s Sung Robotics Lab is working with NASA to lead an initiative investigating how robots can explore and navigate extraterrestrial environments.
The project, titled “Temporarily, Robots Unite to Surmount Sandy Entrapments, then Separate," is led by School of Engineering and Applied Sciences researchers from the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception Lab in partnership with NASA and researchers from other universities. Their research centers around a multi-robot system that allows the robots to physically connect, pulling and pushing each other to overcome environmental hazards.
Engineering professor and principal lead Cynthia Sung said that a goal of the project is to create a robot that can successfully interact with lunar surfaces.
“We aim to design systems that perform real-world tasks as best as possible,” Sung told Penn Engineering Today. “To do this, we have to build the complexity of the environment into the model as well as find ways where our work in soft robotics’ interactions applies to hard robots traversing soft, sandy terrain.”
Towards this end, researchers combined wheeled rovers and legged robots to maximize maneuverability and stability.
“By relying on multiple individual robots instead of one, we create a more robust system aligned with NASA’s current robotic infrastructure,” Sung added. “If one robot fails, the system can still function. That wouldn’t be the case if we just designed one robot that could do all the jobs needed.”
The project’s website explains that a priority is to have “heterogeneous teams of ground robots” so that “each robot interacts differently with the terrain, offering unique capabilities in team operations.” With such a diverse team of robots, the robots can divide tastes and explore difficult environments, making lunar and Martian missions more feasible.
The research follows a $2 million grant from NASA in December 2023 to support the project.
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In August, the researchers tested the new multi-robot system at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico, where they were able to reproduce similar conditions to the moon and Mars.
During their field testing, researchers observed that the robots connected together and were able to climb up about 2.5 meters up the sand dunes. The team described this as a “big success” as it showed how the multi-robot systems could handle environments currently off-limits to single rovers.
The team is scheduled to present the system at the NASA Ames Research Center in early 2026. According to Sung, the limited room provided to the robots to maneuver will make the demonstration extra challenging.
“We’re a little nervous, sure,” project researcher and sixth-year Engineering Ph.D. candidate Shivangi Misra said to Penn Engineering Today. “With every test we run, there is something to improve in the hardware [and] the software. But we’ve done what feels like the hard part, and we think we’re in pretty good shape for what comes next.”
