"When I observed my first transurethral resection, I was amazed at how crude the instruments are and how much pushing and stretching of the patient's body is required,"Simaan said.

That experience inspired the engineer to develop a system that uses micro-robotics to perform this difficult type of surgery. Its features and capabilities are described in an article titled "Design and Evaluation of a Minimally Invasive Telerobotic Platform for Transurethral Surveillance and Intervention" published in the April issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

The first contest involves writing an algorithm that will make Robonaut 2 locate and understand whether buttons and switches on a dashboard are turned off or on. NASA has provided images of the boards on the station, Linear electric actuator in a laboratory and in a simulator. Every setting has a different set of circumstances that the robot would need to work within.

"The successful algorithm application must work with each of several different camera systems and varying lighting conditions within each environment," TopCoder officials said.

Together, NASA and TopCoder have conducted a $30,000 Longeron contest for software designed to help the space station maximize power from its solar arrays; Motion controller a $24,000 Space Med Kit competition for a new algorithm for space medical monitoring; and the $13,000 Planetary Data System Idea Challenge to a new way to search from NASA's more than 100 terabytes of space image and data from 30 years of planetary missions.