Zero Robotics is an international high school programming competition where students control robotic SPHERES aboard the International Space Station. Each year teams of students work to produce code capable of performing in a game that can be deployed on the SPHERES. This game generally contains elements such as docking with objects, moving objects, and destroying targets within a bounded area while monitoring fuel usage.

The Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellite (SPHERES) are a series of miniaturized satellites developed by MIT's Space Systems Laboratory for NASA and US Military, to be used as a low-risk, extensible test bed for the development of metrology, formation flight, rendezvous, docking and autonomy algorithms that are critical for future space missions that use distributed spacecraft architecture, such as Terrestrial Planet Finder and Orbital Express.