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December 12, 2005
Hopping Robots on Mars
Penelope Boston and Steven Dubowsky have received a grant from NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts to work on tiny hopping robots. An array of the micro-bots could be deployed on Mars, coordinating with one another like a swarm of insects to search for life below the surface of the planet.
The spheres would store up muscle energy, and then "boink" themselves off in various directions.
The researchers have calculated that about a thousand of the robots could be packed into a payload mass the size of one of the current Mars Exploration Rovers. That would give them the flexibility so suffer the loss of a large percentage of the units and still have a network that could be doing recon, sensing, imaging and perhaps even some other science functions.
A fleet of these little spheres would be sent to some promising landing site, exiting from the lander and then making their way over to some subsurface or hazardous terrain, where they deploy themselves as a living robotic network working independently and together. They create a cellular communication network, on a nodal basis.
Some of the units could be fitted with magnification capability, so one could look at the textures of the materials that they are landing on. Some would also have chemical sensors to sniff and sense the chemical environment.
So freakin cool but it reminds me of that one Futurama episode where humans had to do battle with these super intelligent bouncing balls. Hummmmm. . .
Posted by tranism at 3:33 PM | Permalink