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About

Shoya Higa is a robotics researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), pushing the boundaries of autonomous space exploration. His work centers on machine learning for planetary rovers, terramechanics for off-road mobility, and autonomy for extreme environments like Ocean Worlds and glaciers. Higa led the development of **MAARS**, a machine learning-based analytics system that brings Earth’s self-driving AI revolution to Mars and beyond, integrating with JPL’s High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) to enable real-time rover navigation (29 citations). He also advanced the understanding of wheel-soil interaction by measuring stress distributions on grousers (lugs) traveling on loose soil, a critical contribution to rover mobility on the Moon and Mars (10 citations). For future Ocean Worlds missions, Higa developed a Lander Autonomy Testbed to evaluate autonomous sampling under severe communication delays and resource constraints (5 citations). Additionally, he created **IceWorm**, an ice-climbing robot designed for glaciology and extraterrestrial exploration (3 citations). With a career spanning from fundamental terramechanics to cutting-edge autonomy, Higa’s work is instrumental in enabling NASA’s next generation of self-driving rovers and landers for the Moon, Mars, and beyond.