Spring 2026 43 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. 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 psychol- “IT’S LIkE YOu’RE AcTuALLY LIvINg YOuR ScIENcE. FOR THAT WEEk, THE RESEARcH IS HOME.” → RIGHT: On the first day, the multi-university and NASA team began tests on the legged robot LASSIE. ↘ BELOW: Cristina Wilson, assistant professor and senior researcher in OSU’s College of Engineering, is one of the project leaders.
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