Kibo Robot Programming Challenge Final Activity Report

Abstract

On October 8th, 2020 the Kibo Robot Programming Challenge (RPC) Finals Event took place. Student teams from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and UAE were the finalists of the competition and became the first students to ever upload APKs to an Astrobee robot (Bumble) on the ISS. This was the culmination of a joint effort between JAXA’s Int-Ball developing team in Tsukuba, Japan and NASA’s Astrobee Facility team at NASA Ames Research Center\ in California, USA. The collaboration between JAXA and NASA started in late 2017. Throughout this time mutual visits by the engineering and management teams were organized. In July 2019 the Kibo RPC concept was formally defined and the competition started. Hundreds of students across the Asia Pacific region participated and during the final event they did so in real time with the participation of NASA’s astronaut, Chris Cassidy. Chris interacted with the students, JAXA personnel and with the robot during the activity. This report aims to summarize the lessons learned from the several crew and non-crew tended activities, the evaluations performed on ground, the coordination of resources both in the ground and at the International Space Station (ISS) as well as operations. It identifies the issues the teams faced and the solutions put in place to mitigate them.