On Wednesday, August 3, Danielle Wood and the Media Lab hosted local students and educators in person for the end of the five-week Zero Robotics summer program. The summer program invited teams of middle school students and educators to program robots via the NASA Astrobee robotic platform (operated on the International Space Station) by learning to write code. The five-week summer program that invited teams of middle school students and educators to learn to write code, used to program Astrobee robots that NASA operates on the International Space Station.

The event will be livestreamed at https://web.mit.edu/webcast/zerorobotics/sum22/; tune in from your laptop. Those with MIT campus access can drop by the 3rd-floor atrium of E14 to watch it on the big screen! There will also be an in-person event in Bartos Theatre (E15-70), with local students and educators! In addition to the in-person event, teams from across the country will join virtually to view a live connection with the International Space Station (ISS), hosted on the side of the ISS by an astronaut. 

Founded over a decade ago by MIT’s Alvar Saenz-Otero, Jacob Katz and David Miller and co-led by a team from Innovation Learning Center and Aurora Flight Sciences, Zero Robotics is an educational program that hosts tournaments to teach middle and high school students to write code and program with robots on the International Space Station (ISS). The Zero Robotics program originally allowed students to use robotics called SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites); this system was developed by the MIT Space Systems Laboratory, in conjunction with NASA, DARPA, and Aurora Flight Sciences, to provide a safe and reusable zero gravity platform to test sensor, control, and autonomy technologies for use in satellites. 

This year's Zero Robotics program is sponsored by NASA, Aerospace Corporation, Aurora Flight Sciences, and the ISS National Laboratory which is operated by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. MIT collaborates with the Innovation Learning Center to implement Zero Robotics and serve students and educators.