Robot rock at LUNA

ESA's robots get ready to rock at LUNA.

Also known as the Moon on Earth, the LUNA facility near the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany, was unveiled in September 2024, a simulated lunar environment that prepares our return to the Moon. To celebrate, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer joined forces with our robotics experts to showcase their cutting-edge machines Interact and Spot, and the potential of human-robot teamwork for space exploration. 

Meet ESA’s robots: Interact, a wheeled robotic arm, and Spot, a robot dog. ESA’s robotics team in the Netherlands programs these machines for human-robot interaction experiments such as Surface Avatar, where astronauts on the International Space Station control robots in a simulated martian environment on Earth. The robots also starred in the inauguration show of LUNA. The team began preparations at their offices in ESTEC, ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands. 

“First, we had to decide what kind of demonstration we wanted to do with our robots,” says Rute Luz, a robotic engineer at ESA. “We had to make sure the choreography was reliable, following a strict timing for the live show with the astronauts.”  

The team decided to re-use a portion of the robot choreography in the most recent session of Surface Avatar in July 2024, which involved several robots working together to bring a sample to a lunar lander mock-up.  

But this robot choreography at LUNA added a complication. “For Surface Avatar, an astronaut was there to coordinate the robots, but this time we had the challenge of making the robots work completely autonomously,” continues Rute. The team had to programme the robot fleet to recognise once one robot had completed their task so another robot could automatically begin their task. 

Find out how the team prepared the show in our blog.