The scene at the LaFarge company slag site in West Mifflin on Thursday afternoon might not make sense at first.
It wasn’t that a bunch of robotics experts wearing neon yellow safety vests and hardhats and carrying laptops were out there testing out their moon rovers. Such scenes have been going on at the lunar-like site for more than two decades.
“This place is a gift,” said Red Whittaker, the Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor who has been using the site full of variously sized, rocky slag hills to test robots for years. “I think of it as a competitive advantage.”
What might seem strange is that two rival teams — the Pittsburgh team Astrobotic and its partner CMU, and the Japanese team HAKUTO — in the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize race to the moon were out there working together, preparing to test their own rovers on the site.
Though millions of dollars in prizes hang in the balance to see which privately run group will be the first to get an unmanned rover to the moon, drive it 500 meters (about a third of a mile) and beam back high definition video of it to Earth, the two teams do not think of it as an adversarial competition.
“It is ‘co-opetition’ with HAKUTO,” Astrobotic CEO John Thoronton said.
HAKUTO team leader Takeshi Hakamada said unlike some of the 16 other competitors still in the XPrize race who are trying to do it alone, his team, like Astrobotic, sees the bigger picture.
“The XPrize is a kind of weird environment,” Mr. Hakamada said. “It is a competition. But we are also creating a new market with new capabilities. So, to do that, I think we have to work together to make it work.”
In February, HAKUTO became the first XPrize team to sign on as customer to the rocket ship that Astrobotic will lease to get its rover — and others — to the moon.
Astrobotic wants to become “Fed-Ex to the moon,” and hopes its first delivery run sometime in 2016 will involve at least a handful of its XPrize competitors who sign on to be customers.
Mr. Thornton said that Astrobotic hopes to announce additional customers in the next few months.
Although Astrobotic and HAKUTO both hope to explore a pit on the moon with their rovers, they have vastly different approaches to solving the riddle of how to make the moon race work.
Astrobotic has designed a larger rover, named Andy, that it hopes will be sturdy enough to drive down a natural ramp on the moon into a pit near where they are going to park their lander, Griffin.
HAKUTO is using two, smaller rovers to get into the pit. One, a larger rover named Moonraker, will drive to the edge of the pit and then lower a second, even smaller rover, named Tetris, into the pit via a tether.
Asked if he thought the two-rover approach HAKUTO is using will work, Mr. Whittaker, as competitive as ever, said: “We shall see.”
First Published: May 15, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
