Int-Ball2 and Astrobee make their first joint appearance! The Final Run of the 5th Kibo Robot Programming Challenge was conducted on the ISS!

Up until now, Astrobee has been the main focus of Kibo-RPC, but this time, for the first time, the camera robot Int-Ball2 also made an appearance. This was the first joint appearance by Astrobee and Int-Ball2 during the competition. Int-Ball2 successfully completed its mission of delivering images of the on-orbit competition to students monitoring it from the ground in real-time. Int-Ball2 is expected to play an active role in future Kibo-RPC missions. After the competition, there was also a commemorative photo with NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, who oversaw the orbital operation this time (Figs. 2 and 3).

Int-Ball2 is an on-board drone robot that supports astronauts working on the ISS. It was launched in June 2023, with initial checkout being carried out by Astronaut Furukawa in October of the same year. It flies in the ISS under the control of the JAXA Flight Control Team (JFCT), taking photos and videos on behalf of the astronauts. For tasks on orbit involving Kibo-RPC, astronauts prepare the cameras they will use for photography themselves, adjusting the camera settings and angles of view, before taking the photos. However, by using Int-Ball2, the entire process of taking photographs can be carried out remotely from the ground, so there’s less work for the astronauts. Int-Ball2 is scheduled to continue supporting the work of astronauts on orbit as a camera robot. Please stay tuned for more exciting developments from Int-Ball2!

During the on-orbit operation, the programs created by the students from the Kibo-RPC participating countries/region shown in Table 1 were installed on the Astrobee, an ISS on-orbit drone. Students competed against each other through image recognition, accuracy and speed to complete their missions. In the preliminary round, teams ran 10 different Astrobee flight simulations with different image types and difficulty levels, and the average of the 10 scores was used as the team's score. However, during on-orbit operations, the program could be run only once. Also, because the environmental conditions are different between simulations and orbit, it was important to create a program that would work well in space. So, the students revised and modified their programs for the Final Round from the Preliminary Round before the on-orbit operation.

As a special benefit for the students who advanced to the final run, the competition was streamed online in real-time to each of the representative teams on the day of the on-orbit operation, but the students could only watch their own team's run, and no other teams’ run. The students watched Astrobee, installed the program they had created, fly on the Kibo. The students watched Astrobee fly with intense focus, their hands clenched in anticipation, and they were overjoyed when their programs worked (Figure 4). You can see all the teams run on orbit at the final round event on November 9th.

The final round event will be held on November 9, 2024, at the JAXA Tsukuba Space Center and online in a hybrid format. Which team will be crowned the champions?
The final round event will be streamed live on YouTube, so please be sure to check it out!