---
title: "Swarmathon paves way to robot mission on Mars"
description: "A robot on Mars is part of a typical science fiction movie about space exploration."
type: News
tags:
  - News
date: "2018-04"
generated:
  by: "process:scripts/port_legacy_pages.py"
  at: "2026-09-10T00:00:00Z"
sources:
  - id: carc-web
    resource: "https://carc.unm.edu/news--events/News/swarmathon-paves-way-to-robot-mission-on-mars.html"
    title: "Swarmathon paves way to robot mission on Mars (carc.unm.edu)"
    author: "team:unm-carc"
---

# Swarmathon paves way to robot mission on Mars

<p class="carc-byline">April 2018</p>

#### New Mexico team brings home trophy, cash prize

![](/assets/swarmathon-swarm-robot.jpg)

A robot on Mars is part of a typical science fiction movie about space
exploration. But NASA and a team of University of New Mexico researchers have
teamed together to take the fiction out of sending robots to Mars. NASA
recently hosted a Swarmathon event, the brainchild of Melanie Moses, associate
professor of computer science at UNM, who developed the competition as a way
to involve students in programming and computing and prepare for a human
expedition to Mars. Moses and her fellow researchers use resources at the
Center for Advanced Research Computing to prepare the robots (photo right) for
competition.

More than a dozen faculty and students from UNM’s Department of Computer
Science traveled to Kennedy Space Center in Florida April 17-19 for the third
annual NASA Swarmathon. The UNM team develops the basic software and designs
and builds the robots, known as Swarmies, that are used in the competition and
works with NASA at Kennedy Space Center to set up and run the competition in
Florida each year.

As an organizer, UNM didn’t field a team but attending from the state were
Central New Mexico Community College, Navajo Tech in Crownpoint, and
Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, which took second place in the
competition, winning a $3,000 cash prize. SIPI has placed in the top three all
three years the Swarmathon has been held. UNM graduate student Sarah Ackerman
ran a high school edition that included New Mexico high schools.

The robots are programmed to work together like a colony of ants to complete
various tasks. At the competition, they collect cubes marked with bar codes.
On Mars, their teamwork would be crucial to survival of the first humans to
arrive there.

NASA is interested in having swarms of robots go in advance of human missions
to Mars and the moon to collect minerals or water that can be converted into
hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. To that end UNM organizes a competition with
NASA to see which colleges can design the best resource collection algorithms,
explained Matthew Fricke, technical lead of the UNM Swarmathon group and
research assistant professor at the UNM Department of Computer Science.

“College teams that enter the competition, such as SIPI, take the robot
hardware and software we provide and improve it to solve a resource collection
task. So, they do not have a relationship with the UNM team beyond the support
we provide all the competition entrants,” said Fricke. “UNM takes the
innovations developed by teams’ competition, as well as our own research into
resource gathering to produce better algorithms for NASA. We use CARC to
perform large scale tests of those algorithms in simulation.”

![](/assets/swarmathon-2018-swarm-robots.jpg)

Simulations allow researchers to test a network of robots without having to
build a huge fleet of them. Moses said CARC has been greatly beneficial to
Swarmathon program, allowing them to run millions of scenarios with dozens or
even hundreds of robots in a swarm before implementing the programming
algorithms into the Swarmie hardware.

See Moses explain Swarmies and the competition
[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msuzMcrmtBo){target=_blank}. See some
of the robot swarm research Moses has done using CARC resources
[here](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10514-017-9693-2){target=_blank}.