About NASA M-STAR Project

Adaptive Vision-Language-Action Models for Resilient Multi-Robot Collaboration in Unstructured Planetary Environments

This NASA-funded research project is led by California State University, Sacramento. The project is supported by NASA's Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Space Technology Artemis Research (M-STAR) program, which helps Minority Serving Institutions build research capacity in support of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate and the exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Artemis surface operations will begin robot-first. Uncrewed missions must survey the lunar South Pole and prepare infrastructure for next operations. Teams of small, cooperating robots offer more coverage, redundancy, and resilience than a single large rover. Building on NASA JPL's CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) technology demonstration, our project develops AI-driven autonomy that lets robot teams learn continuously, share knowledge efficiently over limited communication links, detect unfamiliar and hazardous situations, and recover safely without human intervention.

The research is validated on a fleet of eight student-built, CADRE-inspired rovers across replicated testbeds at CSUS and SDSU. Development proceeds in stages, from simulation and lunar digital-twin environments through hardware-in-the-loop testing, with technical guidance from collaborators at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), and OpalAI.

Beyond the research, M-STAR is an investment in people. Students take on paid research roles, build and integrate the rover hardware, take part in funded NASA internships, and gain hands-on experience in robotics, embedded AI, and systems engineering that prepares them for careers at NASA and in the aerospace industry.

This material is based upon work supported by NASA under award No. 80NSSC26M0169. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.