Here, a robot about as wide as a large pizza scoots forward on three wheels. It uses an arm with a claw at one end to pick up a plastic block from the floor, then set it back down.
To be sure, this windowless office, complete with gray carpeting, is nothing like the moon. And the robot, nicknamed "Armstrong," wouldn't last a minute on its frigid surface.
But the scene represents a new vision for space exploration-one in which fleets of robots working in tandem with people crawl across the lunar landscape, building scientific observatories or even human habitats.
Xavier O'Keefe operates the robot from a room down the hall. He wears virtual reality goggles that allow him to see through a camera mounted on top of Armstrong.
"It's impressively immersive," said O'Keefe, who earned his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering sciences from CU Boulder this spring. "The first couple of times I used the VR, the robot was sitting in the corner, and it was really weird to see myself using it."
He's part of a team of current and former undergraduate students tackling a tricky question: How can humans on Earth get the training they need to operate robots on the hazardous terrain of the lunar surface? On the moon, gravity is only about one-sixth as strong as it is on our planet. The landscape is pockmarked with craters, some cast in permanent darkness.
In a new study, O'Keefe and fellow CU Boulder alumni Katy McCutchan and Alexis Muniz report that "digital twins," or hyper-realistic virtual reality environments, could provide a useful proxy for the moon-giving people a chance to get the hang of driving robots without risking damage to multi-million-dollar equipment.
The study is funded by NASA and the Colorado company Lunar Outpost. It is part of a larger research effort led by Jack Burns, astrophysics professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA).
"There was a lot of room to make mistakes with Armstrong since it wasn't a million-dollar piece of hardware going to space," said McCutchan, who earned her master's degree in aerospace engineering sciences from CU Boulder in 2025. "It was a good sandbox to mess around in."
"Unlike the Apollo program where human astronauts did all the heavy lifting on the moon, NASA's 21st century Artemis Program will combine astronauts and robotic rovers working in tandem," Burns said. "Our efforts at CU Boulder are intended to make lunar robots more efficient and recoverable from errors, so precious astronaut time on the lunar surface will be better utilized."
The space group's first hurdle: Creating a digital twin for Armstrong to roam around in. To do that, the researchers began by creating a digital replica of their office in a video game engine called Unity-right down to the beige walls and drab carpet.
"We had to get the digital twin as close to real thing as possible," said O'Keefe, who's now a master's student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder. "For example, we timed how fast the robot moved over one yard. Then we did the same test in the virtual environment and got the robot's speed to be the same."
Next, the team ran an experiment. In 2023 and 2024, they recruited 24 human participants to operate Armstrong while sitting in a room down the hall. Donning VR goggles, the subjects took the robot through a simple task: They picked up and adjusted a plastic block that represented one of the antennas in FarView.
Half of the participants, however, got a head start. They first practiced the same task in the digital version of the office.
Humans who got the chance to operate Armstrong's digital twin before driving the real thing completed the task roughly 28% faster than participants who only got the chance to operate the physical robot. They also reported that they felt less stress during the task.
"That's what is really exciting about this-you're able to simulate everything in the environment, from the shadows to the texture of the dirt, and then train operators on conditions that are as close to real as possible," O'Keefe said. "That way, once you get to the moon, you have a higher chance of success."
For example, when the researchers began the experiment, they discovered that the human subjects kept making the same mistake. When they went to pick up the fake antennas with Armstrong, they often flipped the blocks over by accident. The group hadn't anticipated that.
"Whenever you get people involved, they do things in ways you wouldn't expect them to," said McCutchan, who recently started work as a mechanical solutions test engineer at BAE Systems, an aerospace company.
Today, Burns' team is moving onto a new goal: They're recreating the much more complex environment of the lunar surface. The researchers are working with the Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost to build a digital twin of a rover on the moon in the same game engine. The hardest part, O'Keefe said, is getting the lunar dust just right.
"The rover will kick up dust with its wheels as it drives, and that could possibly block sensors or cameras," O'Keefe said. "But it's really hard to know exactly how dust moves on the moon because you can't just go outside and measure it."
For now, he is happy being a part of the future of lunar exploration, albeit from the safety of campus.
"It's awesome to be part of this, even if it is a small part of getting people on the moon."
Research Report:Practice makes perfect: A study of digital twin technology for assembly and problem-solving using lunar surface telerobotics
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