Sawyer Brooks
Papers
8
Total Citations
65
H-Index
5
About
Sawyer Brooks is a leading robotics engineer whose work has been pivotal to NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, specializing in robotic operations, sampling, and caching systems. Brooks’s major contributions center on the development and validation of the rover’s Sampling and Caching Subsystem (SCS)—the most complex robotic system ever deployed on Mars. Their highly cited paper on the first 210 solar days of Perseverance’s robotic operations (20 citations) provides critical lessons learned from mobility, robotic arm, and helicopter operations. Brooks also designed the “Blue Box” Electrical Ground Support Equipment for testing SCS hardware, and developed the Intelligent Robotics System Architecture (IRSA) used across multiple testbeds and research platforms. Their work on docking the Perseverance robotic arm and verifying the SCS’s complex mechanisms has been essential to mission success, enabling the collection of rock and regolith samples for potential return to Earth. With over 65 total citations, Brooks’s research bridges terrestrial robotics testbeds and interplanetary exploration, advancing autonomous assembly and verification strategies for future space missions.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Software system for the Mars 2020 mission sampling and caching testbeds13 citations · 2018
- 3
- 4Docking the Mars 2020 Perseverance Robotic Arm7 citations · 2022
- 5
- 6
- 7An untethered mobile limb for modular in-space assembly4 citations · 2016
- 8