Mini-Robot Spheres Rolling and Bouncing on Mars
“The reason they’re very attractive for the caves is a normal rover wouldn’t be able to go down there and certainly wouldn’t be able to come back up,” Dubowsky told New Scientist.
With funding from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, prototype micro-bots are being developed by Steven Dubowsky of MIT in the U S, along with his colleagues. Plans are being planned for caves in New Mexico to test the little micro-bots for future missions for exploration of Martian caves. They have an advantage over the rovers for working in caves as they are less expensive, do not compromise a mission if damaged or lost, and the rovers do not have the flexibility to go down into the deep caves nor come back up easily, if at all.
The design for the micro-bots need to be built and designed for tackling the sort of terrain that is similar to today’s planetary rovers, while performing a collective sort of research at less expensive—referring to the fact some of the bots may be lost or damaged but yet is acceptable as it would not jeopardize the mission involved. So far, they have been designed with its weight on one side, allowing them to always come to rest in a particular orientation when they fall. Always, they will land sitting on top of some sort of its device that is being designed to extend rapidly for the little robot to jump.
The rover type robot could work if the cave was guaranteed to be simple with a straight design. Otherwise, the rover would not work requiring something like an array of microbots, using sonar or another method to confirm cave presence and pinpointing a location. The robot will need to be agile, a basic sense of self-awareness, a night vision that is excellent, and can communicate with each other. The radio communication that the rovers use will not work in the caves.
What will be a focus of the micro-bots is the image of the Mars’s cave images recently taken by the Mars Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System, called the seven sisters—Dena, Chloa, Wendy, Annie, Abbey, Nikki, and Jeanne. Located near the Martian volcano Arisa Mons, some are thought to range 430 feet across. The micro-bot robots were designed to explore caves such as these, which will be field tested before leaving for Mars. Many types of caves will require many types of robots.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
