In the fall of 2010, I started and led a team that competed in the Zero Robotics competition.
Zero Robotics is a student competition that takes "arena robotics" to new heights, literally. The robots are miniature satellites called SPHERES and the final competition of every tournament is aboard the International Space Station!
Our code is available on GitHub.
Both the 2010 and 2011 competitions were focused on alternative energy sources. In the 2010 competition, HelioSPHERES, we programmed a satellite to automatically repair a virtual solar power station. In the 2011 competition, AsteroSPHERES, we are programming a satellite to extract Helium-3 (a promising isotope to be used as a nuclear energy source), from two virtual asteroids.
Video from the 2010 ISS Finals:
Before deploying to the space station, we rigorously tested the satellite's behavior in MIT's MATLAB-based simulator: