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The Mission

Robots on the Road (ROTR) is a traveling program brought to you by NASA's Aerospace Education Specialists Project (AESP). When ROTR visits your school, your students will engage in exciting, hands-on robotics activities in which they are given a robot and asked to discover what tasks it can complete are and how it is able to complete them. To fully understand how the robots operate, students will need to use problem-solving, team building, and critical thinking skills which simulate those used by NASA scientists and engineers.
Read how Robots on the Road applies to the National Science Standards. (pdf, 78 KB)

MINDSTORMS®

LEGO®MINDSTORMS® is a robotics kit that combines LEGO® building elements with sophisticated electronics. The NXT microcomputer is the core of each creation, interfacing various sensors (input) with electric motors (output). This allows children and adults to use the NXT to create countless unique robotic devices capable of exploring and manipulating their surroundings.

Each MINDSTORMS® kit includes the software needed to program the NXT using a PC or Mac. The software was designed for use by children as young as eight, and utilizes a simplified graphical approach to building the programs which control the robots.

The FIRST LEGO® League (FLL) is a NASA-sponsored competition in which teams of various age groups design, build, and compete their own robotic creations. Each year the competition is themed towards real-world challenges (such as conservation and space exploration) and is designed to excite kids about science and technology. If you like what you see when Robots on the Road visits your school, we strongly encourage you to learn more about starting a FLL team.

NASA Robotics

A robot is a machine that is capable of performing some portion of its tasks using its own sensory inputs, independent of direct human control. Robots are designed to assist humans and to carry out tasks that humans are unable to do. In 1958 the United States launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, leading to the establishment of NASA later that year. Since the Explorer 1, NASA has employed robotic devices to explore and collect data from the celestial bodies of our solar system and beyond. These robots carry out tasks such as geologic and atmospheric sampling and analysis and topographical documentation.

In 1962 the Mariner 2 reached Venus and became the first spacecraft to return data from another planet and by 1966 NASA successfully landed the Surveyor 1 on the surface of the moon. Thirty years later, in 1996, the Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars and deployed the Mars Sojourner, the first automated extraterrestrial surface explorer. Since this historic mission NASA has landed three additional robotic explorers on Mars and one on Titan (Saturn's largest moon). Today, NASA has more than fifteen functional robots exploring our solar system and many exciting plans for future missions.