Hopping Toward Planetary Exploration, Swarm of small spherical robots the size Options

[RNeuhaus]

A new possible modality of exploration to Mars with microbots.

That plan, according to its research team, calls for a swarm of small, spherical robots the size of tennis balls to hop across another world exploring caves, nooks and other crannies that past mobile robots have been too large to study.


Swarming Mars

A single golf-cart sized Mars rover weighs about 384 pounds (174 kilograms) and includes a sophisticated suite of cameras, spectrometers and other geological tools to study the red planet’s surface.

“We (put) about 1,000 of these microbots into that mass,” Boston said. “And that would allow a great diversity of robots.”

The microbots envisioned by Dubowsky and Boston would push themselves along using a polymer-based artificial muscle that would kick them about one meter forward about once every hour. They would also be capable of carrying a miniaturized suite of science instruments, such as cameras, spectrometers or other sensors, that could be tailored for a specific mission.

Not yet know about its duration.

he other benefit of a microbot swarm is redundancy, Boston said.

Not only could a series of individual units be lost without compromising a mission’s integrity, a network of functional microbots could provide a vital relay link to a remote base or orbital craft during subsurface exploration.

“These guys need to keep in communication with each other,” Boston said. “So they could set up a node-to-node communications system a lot like a cellular [phone] network. Everybody will know where everybody else is.”

From that base, the microbots could eventually be capable of complex behavior, she added.


That is a novel idea, about the price, it would be much lower than MSL but its mission , I think it is more specialiced such as to collect the general information for a zone about its minerology, morphology, climatology, other geology terms. I seems it would be useful for inspecting the zone before any spacecraft will land it with its many pictures, and meteorolgical data.

The source of the information, click here :space.com.

Rodolfo

[Bob Shaw]

Rodolfo:

Both 'emergent behaviour' - like birds flocking, and vehicles which mimic the patterns of insect movement etc are intriguing possibilities for all sorts of exploration and exploitation of strange places. The potential for insect-like autonomy is very attractive, and trainable neural nets appear likely to be quite efficient as compared to the ever-deeper complexities of hard AI. I suppose the problem is, can you breed the little darlings?

Bob Shaw

[djellison]

Cute I remember an animation by Dan Maas (I'm sure it was one of Dans) that showed little flapping robots collecting samples - they were wonderfull.

Doug

[RNeuhaus]

I suppose the problem is, can you breed the little darlings?

Bob:

That is true. They are planning to send hundreds even thousands of hops and the collection of data sent from these darling would be a challenging mission. Logistically, it is possible since every hop have their own identification but the problem is the capability of the orbiter to keep up with the sent data and also the precise timing among these hops in synchronization of their activities. Finally, the task to analyze all collected data must be highly structured so not to miss so much time as does in the case of MARSIS that is taking very long time to analyze the eco sonar data.

Rodolfo