Congratulations to our “Hondanauts” Nils Einecke and Steffen Limmer who managed to achieve the first place in the fourth Space Optimization Competition (SpOC) organized by the ESA Advanced Concepts Team.

With this latest achievement, HRI-EU was among the top three teams in all four SpOC events, with three first places and one second place. The Space Optimization Competition is about solving challenging optimization problems related to space travel, usually put in a fictional futuristic context.

This year’s competition was all about bringing delicious tomatoes to hungry inhabitants living in lunar city on the moon in the year 2082. Because everybody loves tomatoes, right? Three problems had to be solved that revolved around the classical hard optimization problems “traveling salesman” and “assignment”, coupled with astrophysics for finding good trajectories between orbits. Accordingly, Team HRI tackled these by using classical optimal and heuristic solvers together with established techniques from optimization like large neighborhood search and CMA- ES.

While space travel is not a direct research direction of the Honda Research Institute, it fits HRI’s mission to research promising future technologies that enhance human and societal well-being. Hence, space travel is in good company with current research topics of HRI like quantum computing, biological wet computing, and the psychology of human-robot and human-AI collaboration.