From White Sands to the Red PlanetHow OSU researchers are helping a four-legged robot find its footing on Mars.

Each strike sounds like the footfall of soldiers marching in formation and leaves a golf ball-sized print behind in the sand. A four-legged, dog-like robot — aptly named LASSIE — is walking on the wind-sculpted dunes of White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Its every step is a data point that a team of robotics researchers, including scientists from Oregon State University, will use to put a bold plan into action: sending LASSIE to Mars.

The varying textures of the park’s white, gypsum sand — hard, crusty, squishy, loose — make it an ideal place to prepare for the Martian surface. Data gleaned from the motors in the robot’s legs will inform future decisions, such as where to potentially land LASSIE on Mars and what areas of the planet to explore.

The research is part of the next evolution of NASA’s off-Earth exploration. Manned rovers on the moon and unmanned rovers on Mars have driven decades of discovery. But rovers have limits. Their wheels get stuck in loose terrain, they can struggle to navigate uneven ground and they typically operate with pre-programmed agendas, which limits their ability to adapt as new opportunities arise.

Enter quadrupeds. These robots move like animals. Their ability to “feel” the terrain with their feet allows them to adjust their stride in real time, opening new possibilities for science. That autonomy, driven by the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, is critical for future Mars missions. A quadruped could work independently alongside astronauts and rovers, while coordinating with scientists on Earth, multiplying the amount of research that gets done. In other words, the robot would be more than just a tool; it would be a collaborator.

That’s the framework Cristina Wilson, assistant professor and senior researcher in the College of Engineering at OSU, is working with a team of researchers to optimize.

“When you put humans on the surface of Mars, you have an entirely different environment,” Wilson said. “There’s all of these interesting ways that we can reimagine human-robot teaming for science.”

The research builds on decades of innovation that have already led to rovers and a drone-like helicopter exploring Mars. Ryan Ewing, science mobility lead for NASA’s Artemis Internal Science Team and a collaborator on the LASSIE project, believes the dog robot is an important component of future NASA work.

“I envision a legged robot as a companion or a scout for humans,” he said. “Legged robots may enable exploring different terrains — more challenging terrains — than a rover can.”

Ewing and Wilson were among the team of nearly 40 scientists who traveled to White Sands National Park in August 2025. Conditions were challenging. The landscape is exposed, with little shade or shelter. The reflective white sand made sunglasses and frequent sunscreen applications a must.

Wake-up calls came as early as 4 a.m. To avoid the worst of the heat — daytime temperatures reached triple digits, unsafe for both humans and robots — the researchers set up their field equipment before sunrise and started experiments as the sun rose over the mountains to the east, revealing skies of muted orange, yellow and pink.

More than a Tool

The LASSIE project builds on a decades of robotics research at Oregon State. Scientists have deployed robots everywhere from forests and farms to healthcare settings and deep underwater. Dozens of faculty members and hundreds of students study robots, considering their impacts on people as well as their potential to shape the future.

Wilson co-leads LASSIE, which stands for Legged Autonomous Surface Science In Analogue Environments. The project integrates legged robot mobility, new sensing technology and human-robot collaborative reasoning to create robots that can turn every step into a scientific experiment.

Started in 2018, LASSIE also includes scientists from the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania, the Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Texas A&M University and Temple University.

It’s like you’re actually living your science. For that week, the research is home.

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This multidisciplinary team is made up of engineers, geologists, planetary scientists and, perhaps surprisingly, cognitive scientists, who study how humans perceive, learn and make decisions. Together, they are tackling different pieces of a complex challenge: designing a legged robot capable of doing meaningful science in unfamiliar terrain.

Wilson is a cognitive scientist with multiple degrees in psychology. Her focus within the project is helping the robot and humans actively share information, anticipate one another’s decisions and adjust their actions as a team. The goal is a robot that isn’t just taking orders but is built to understand what scientists are trying to accomplish and help them reason through their next move.

She points out that robotics engineers and geologists each have their own tools to answer questions like where a robot should go, but those tools aren’t merged. “That’s a big focus now: taking how scientists think about exploration and representing it in a way the robot can understand — and vice versa,” Wilson said.

Early on in the project, Ewing, the NASA scientist and geologist, recognized the value of someone with Wilson’s background. “I had not thought about working with cognitive scientists in the context of robotic applications,” he said. “But once I talked to Cristina, it was obvious why that was needed. It expanded the scope of the project and my thinking about this problem.”

Left: On the first day, the multi-university and NASA team began tests on the legged robot LASSIE. Right: Cristina Wilson, assistant professor and senior researcher in OSU’s College of Engineering, is one of the project leaders.

Steps Toward Mars

In recent years, the team has made trips to Oregon’s Mount Hood to simulate the lunar environment, and New Mexico’s White Sands National Park to approximate the Martian landscape. During the August trip to White Sands, Wilson was joined by six others from her lab, including Mason Allen.

Allen met Wilson as a first-year undergraduate in 2022 and started working in her lab shortly after that. Now a senior, he is focused on designing, assembling and refining the robot leg that gathers much of the critical data for the research. Most recently, he has designed experiments to test the leg in the lab.

He joined the team on a trip to Mount Hood in 2023 and spent much of the time shadowing graduate students and assisting with the operation of field equipment. This past summer in New Mexico, he collected data, ran experiments and had a fellow undergraduate student shadowing him.

“One of the best decisions I made in college was joining the lab,” Allen said. “It really gave me a leg up in a lot of ways, particularly getting early hands-on experience with engineering and being exposed to multi-disciplinary work. All that has made me a lot better as an engineer.”

Living the Science

White Sands sits about 100 miles north of the Mexican border in the Tularosa Basin, with mountain peaks between 8,000 and 10,000 feet to the east and west. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945.

It’s also host to the world’s largest gypsum dunefield. Covering about 275 square miles of desert, the gypsum in these sands originated roughly 280 million years ago when the Permian Sea covered the area and the mineral settled on the sea floor. Later, when the ancient sea dried up, the gypsum crystals broke down into sand and blew into dunes. The shaping and reshaping of the dunefield continues today in an endless cycle of erosion and renewal, mirroring processes suspected to have occurred on Mars.

Wilson and the LASSIE team scout routes (top left) and review the robot’s self-generated walking plans at sunrise (top right). OSU senior Mason Allen and undergraduate researcher Iris Li delve into the data and human-robot exchanges shaping every step (bottom left and right).

During the August trip to White Sands, early morning field work was followed by afternoon debriefings and late-night equipment repair sessions. Workdays stretched up to 16 hours. 

“It’s taxing, physically and psychologically,” Wilson said. “You’re always on. You’re sharing a room, usually with a member of the research team. It’s like you’re actually living your science. For that week, the research is home.”

During the week, important advances were made. For the first time, the robot walked in different ways — trading off between prioritizing gait efficiency and sensing precision. It also began making some decisions on its own without human input. The data gathered will be used by the team to refine models that will allow LASSIE to better navigate the varied terrain and help scientists.

Ewing, the NASA scientist, said the technology for LASSIE has progressed enough to start thinking about how to get it flight ready.

Field tests like these help prepare LASSIE for future Mars missions and could one day guide robots navigating hazardous terrain on Earth, from wildfire zones to remote construction sites.

“We want to push this forward from an academic project and exploration to ‘Let’s go do this,’” he said.

Still, there’s work ahead and years until LASSIE will reach the Moon or Mars. Wilson feels fortunate to work on the edge of a developing field.

“One of my postdoc advisors had a nameplate that said, ‘Science Fiction Writer,’” she said. “It’s true. In robotics, we write proposals for research funding, but we’re also writing science fiction. Everyone does to some extent, but with robots, it feels even more novelesque, maybe? That’s an incredible intellectual space to live in.”