Three California teams competed for $600,000 in prizes from NASA in the Space Robotics challenge, held June 13-16.
The teams from Newbury Park, San Jose and Fresno competed against 89 other citizen inventor teams from around the world.
NASA predicts robots will work with astronauts in the future to perform complex work without human assistance.
The software developed by each team for the competition had to work within a virtual environment that could eventually be applied to hardware. The competition program required the robot to repair a habitat leak, align a communications dish and fix a solar array as if it were repairing damage from a martian dust storm.
Each robot also had to function despite communication delays from Earth, represented by periods of latency.
