AILSA CHANG, HOST:
People love going to festivals in the desert, right? Like, think Burning Man or Coachella. But, you know, there is one desert festival that not many people know about, tucked away in a windy spot near Barstow, California.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing) Lay down, Sally...
ROB MUELLER: Thanks for coming. Welcome. Welcome to the Mojave Desert.
CHANG: (Laughter).
It's got all the trappings of any old desert fest. You got the live bands, the food trucks, the dusty people. But the stars of this show are not the humans.
Ooh. Come here. Come here. Come here. Oh, my God. You're so cute. OK, sit. Sit. No, that's down. Come on. Come on.
I mean, they're not dogs, either - at least not furry dogs. The main performers here are robots. That's why they call this RoboPalooza. And this doggy robot is named Go1.
Oh, my God, he's wiggling his butt. That's amazing (laughter).
And Go1 even has his own robot human named Hector.
Is he trying to hug me right now?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah, we can...
CHANG: Hi, Hector. We're embracing.
RoboPalooza isn't just some rock concert with some robots sprinkled in. This whole thing is actually about the future of space. It's sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. And this festival is exploring how humans and robots can work together, with one of the goals being settling the moon and Mars one day with robots like Turbo, who's learning how to dig moon dust here.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: As you can see, the belt spins up.
CHANG: He can bury the - oh.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yep.
CHANG: The belt is going - dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
Students at the University of Alabama designed Turbo to one day be able to extract resources on the moon. And somehow, they actually trusted me to drive him.
Will it go forward? Let's try up. Uh-oh. Oh, no...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Oh, there we go.
CHANG: Oh, good. I thought I broke...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: It might have got a little stuck.
CHANG: ...Turbo for a second...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Oh, no.
CHANG: ...There (laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: He's very strong.
CHANG: But breaking Turbo and other bots like him - well, that's the whole point of this festival. You see, RoboPalooza is one massive stress test for these machines. That's why the festival's mastermind, NASA technologist Rob Mueller, picked this very location.
MUELLER: It's an extreme environment. That's why we're here. There's blowing dust. It gets hot in the day, cold at night. Today's cold.
CHANG: So if a robot can survive this, it can definitely survive Mars.
MUELLER: We want to break the robots.
CHANG: (Laughter).
MUELLER: Many times.
CHANG: What I don't understand is hasn't humanity, including NASA, gotten a good amount of experience driving rovers on Mars in recent decades? Like, what more is there to learn? Explain that to people.
MUELLER: The rovers that have driven on Mars are science rovers. They're very good at what they do. They're very expensive. They have a lot of instruments on them, and they drive very, very slowly. They literally drive at a snail's pace.
CHANG: Literally?
MUELLER: Literally. You can't do it at a snail's pace. You have to move faster. But to move faster, you need a higher level of autonomy. And so that's why we're here. It's basically to learn and to build better robots.
CHANG: And what they're doing today is a competition between the humans who operate these robots. They're holding a rover race. Rob shows me the race course.
MUELLER: We're at the starting line. We have two...
CHANG: This fluorescent...
MUELLER: ...Traffic cones.
CHANG: ...Green line right here...
MUELLER: Yes.
CHANG: ...Is the starting line? OK.
MUELLER: Yes.
CHANG: Yeah.
MUELLER: So imagine you're at the top of a mountain on a ski race, and you're just going through the starting line.
CHANG: And then seven teams slalom a 700-pound dune buggy of a rover named Helelani through a sandy, hilly race course, with all these cones marking the route to the finish line.
MUELLER: You have to drive around the cone without hitting it.
CHANG: This is like a dog agility competition.
MUELLER: Something like that.
CHANG: (Laughter).
Now, some of the teams competing today are physically located thousands of miles away - in Virginia, Chile, Australia - and they are relying solely on the rover's on-board cameras to steer the machine through the course.
Did it just spin around?
MUELLER: It just spun, which means they issued a command.
CHANG: Oh, it's rolling.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROBOT WHIRRING)
CHANG: There is one local team here from Cal Poly Pomona, and Rob takes us over to their mission control.
MUELLER: It's a mobile command trailer.
CHANG: Wait, mission control is this RV?
MUELLER: Yes, it's just a trailer. And we have everything set up - an antenna and all the computers - about four of these going on at once.
CHANG: So this is like your Houston. Houston, Houston - this is...
MUELLER: Yes.
CHANG: All right. Let's go in (laughter).
And inside, Cal Poly team members are hunched over their laptops, steering Helelani by watching video feeds transmitting from her.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Turn left 20 degrees. Move forward 20. So around and 14 on our left. And we're headed straight for the finish line.
CHANG: This whole race happening here today - it's just a tiny step towards humanity's future in space. At least that's how Rob sees it.
MUELLER: It's not just the moon. It's the whole solar system.
CHANG: OK.
MUELLER: There's huge abundance in our solar system of resources - energy, water ice - which is hydrogen and oxygen - metals, minerals. If we want to evolve as a species, we have to harness the energy and the resources in our solar system.
CHANG: Tell me what you would like to see or what you do see happening on the moon one day, a century from now.
MUELLER: The moon will be a staging point for transportation into the solar system. Think of it as a gas station. You go to the moon, and you refuel your rocket, and then you go on to the asteroid belt. You go on to Mars.
CHANG: So you see humans one day bopping around space and using the moon as a rest stop.
MUELLER: That will be part of it, but it will be a very interesting place. And some people will want to live there. Some people will want to work there. And some people will want to play there. Imagine playing basketball on the moon.
CHANG: So in order to get to this idea - this reality of the moon becoming a place where people can rest, work, play, live, where do robots enter the picture? Why are robots necessary to make that vision a reality?
MUELLER: If you went to paradise in the South Pacific and there was no hotel waiting for you, and there was no resort and no entertainment, you wouldn't want to go to...
CHANG: I'd be like, it's hot...
MUELLER: Yes.
CHANG: ...And there are a lot of mosquitoes.
MUELLER: Exactly. And...
CHANG: So you need infrastructure.
MUELLER: We need infrastructure.
CHANG: And to build that infrastructure, I'm imagining you need the robots.
MUELLER: The robots will build the infrastructure. They are good at building infrastructure. They don't complain. They work 24 hours a day. They...
CHANG: You don't need to feed them. Well, I guess...
MUELLER: You don't need to feed them.
CHANG: ...You might need some battery.
MUELLER: You do need power.
CHANG: (Laughter).
MUELLER: There's a lot of power in space from solar power from our sun, and we also can generate nuclear power.
CHANG: But the robots are going to be the construction crew.
MUELLER: Exactly. And it will be many robots, swarms of robots, hundreds of robots.
CHANG: Why is it important to you and to so many of these other scientists, these other people involved in this effort, to one day colonize parts of space?
MUELLER: It's our human spirit to be explorers. We're always looking for the next frontier. And we don't know why we're going or what will happen. That's why we go. We don't know what will happen, so we have to go. And it will be completely unpredictable and unexpected. And we will have things that make money and give you a thriving prosperity that we can't even imagine yet. That's why we go. If we did know, we wouldn't have to go.
CHANG: It's the urge to explore...
MUELLER: Yes.
CHANG: ...What's unknown. That's what's driving you and your work.
MUELLER: I think that's what's driving humanity.
CHANG: And if Rob is right, it's the robots who will lead the way.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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