NASA Valkyrie robot: DARPA Robotics Challenge

NASA's new robot Valkyrie was designed for the DARPA Robotics Challenge taking place in December 2013.

Credit: NASA

The newest humanoid robot from NASA just might be mistaken for a superhero.

The space agency's new Valkyrie — a 6 foot 2 inch tall (1.9 meters) robot with a glowing NASA logo on its chest — bears an uncanny resemblance to Marvel's superhero Iron Man, but this space age automaton was built for work, not comic book heroics.

A team of engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Tex., designed and built Valkyrie in just nine months, according to press reports.

The robot was developed for the DARPA Robotics Challenge taking place at the end of the month and is designed to help humans during disasters.

Valkyrie will soon be a contestant in The Department of Defense's Robotics Challenge where the world's best robot will win a $2 million prize.

To test its capabilities, the DARPA competition will run Valkyrie through a variety of scenarios that it might encounter in extreme situations.

Valkyrie will need to drive a vehicle, clean up debris, cut through a wall and perform other tasks to show that it has the right stuff.

"We want to get to Mars," the team leader for Valkyrie, Nicolaus Radford told IEEE Spectrum in a video about the robot. "Likely, NASA will send robots ahead of the astronauts to the planet.

These robots will start preparing the way for the human explorers and when the humans arrive, the robots and the humans will work together in conjunction building habs [habitats], laying foundation and just working together in that tight relationship.

Technologies such as Valkyrie are going to really lead into the type of robotic systems that will one day be the precursor missions before the astronauts go to Mars."