Robots can one day cross the month, and undergraduates have a foundation

The future of lunar exploration could be lying around the unexplained offices of the CU Boulder Campus. Here, the robot is as wide as a large pizza scooter on three wheels that scoot forward. Using an arm with a claw on one end, pick up a plastic block from the floor and then put it back in.

Certainly, this windowless office with grey carpet is not like the moon, and the robot called “Armstrong” doesn’t last for a minute on frigid surfaces.

However, this scene represents a new vision of space exploration. It’s a new vision for space exploration. This is a fleet of robots in parallel with people craving across the lunar landscape, building scientific observatory, and even covering human habitats.

Xavier O’Keefe runs the robot from the room under the hall. He wears virtual reality goggles that can be seen through a camera mounted on top of Armstrong.

“It’s impressively immersive,” said O’Keefe, who earned his Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences from CU Boulder this spring. “The first few times I used VR, the robot sat in the corner. It was really strange to see myself using it.”

He is part of a team of current and former undergraduate students working on tricky questions. How can humans on Earth get the training they need to operate robots on dangerous terrain on the moon? On the moon, gravity is only a sixth, as strong as our planet. The landscape has craters pockmarked, some cast in permanent darkness.

In a new study appearing in advances in space research, O’Keefe and fellow CU Boulder alumni Katy McCutchan and Alexis Muniz report that “digital twins” or surreal virtual reality environments can provide useful proxies for the moon.

The research is led by Jack Burns’ large-scale research efforts, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences (APS), and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA).

“It wasn’t part of Armstrong and $1 million hardware, so there was a lot of room to make mistakes with Armstrong,” said McCatchchan, who received his master’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from CU Boulder in 2025.

Digital Twin

In the case of Barnes, a co-author of the study, Armstrong and his VR digital twin represent a huge leap despite the robot’s humble appearance. Burns is part of a team working on designing the future science observatory of the moon called Farview, which consists of a web of 100,000 antennas extending approximately 77 square miles from the moon. Chapel Hill, Daniel Zaffeel at the University of North Carolina, was also a co-author of the new study.

“Unlike the Apollo program, where human astronauts do everything heavy on the moon, NASA’s 21st century Artemis program works with astronauts with robot rovers,” Burns said. “Our efforts at Cu Boulder are aimed at making lunar robots more efficient and recoverable from errors, so precious astronauts time on the moon will be better utilized.”

Space Group’s First Hurdle: Create a digital twin for Armstrong to roam around. To that end, researchers began by using a video game engine called Unity to create digital replicas of their offices using a video game engine that approaches beige walls and monotonous carpets.

“We had to get the digital twin as close to the real thing as possible,” said O’Keefe, now a master’s student at ANN and HJ Smead School of Aerospace Engineering, Sciences at CU Boulder. “For example, we timing how fast the robot moved in one yard. We then did the same test in a virtual environment and made the robots the same speed.”

The team then ran the experiment. In 2023 and 2024, they recruited 24 human participants to operate Armstrong while sitting in the room under the hall. Wearing VR goggles, subjects employed the robot through a simple task. I picked up and adjusted the plastic block representing one of the Farview’s antennas.

However, half of participants got a head start. They first practiced the same task in the digital version of the office.

Humans who had the opportunity to operate Armstrong’s digital twins before driving the real thing completed the task approximately 28% faster than participants who only had the opportunity to operate physical robots. They also reported that they felt less stressful during the task.

“It’s really exciting about this. You can simulate everything in your environment, from shadows to soil textures, and then you can train your operators in conditions as close to the real thing as possible,” O’Keefe said. “If you do that, once you get to the moon, you’ll have a higher chance of success.”

Real-world experience

McCatchchan, who also joined the project as an undergraduate student, added that the study gave her and her fellow students a foundation on how research in the real world works.

For example, when researchers began their experiments, they discovered that human subjects continued to make the same mistakes. When they went with Armstrong to pick up a fake antenna, they often accidentally flipped the block over. The group didn’t expect that.

“Every time people get involved, they do things in ways you don’t expect,” says McCutchan, who recently started working as a mechanical solutions test engineer for aerospace company BAE Systems.

Today, Burns’ team is moving towards a new goal. They replicate a much more complex environment on the moon. Researchers are working with Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost to build a digital twin of Rover on the moon with the same gaming engine. The most difficult part, O’Keefe said, is getting the moon dust just right.

“The rover could kick dust with the wheels while driving, blocking sensors and cameras,” O’Keefe said. “But it’s really hard to know exactly how the moon’s dust moves, as you can’t go out and measure it.”

For now, he is pleased to be part of the future of exploring the moon, albeit from the safety of the campus.

“It’s great to be part of this, even if it’s just a small part of putting people on the moon.”