Robot Imitates Tumbleweed
NASA Youtube
Amina Khan | The Los Angeles Times
a team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View has devised a strange, flexible "super ball bot" concept that could take a rough landing on another world’s surface and use the same structure to start rolling like a tumbleweed around the terrain.
This system would be completely different, Vytas Sunspiral, a senior robotics researcher at NASA Ames, explains in a NASA video.
It sports a semi-rigid but flexible structure, that can distribute the force from an impact at one point all over its system.
It’s a lot like a much more familiar shock-absorption system: our own skeletons. There’s no pin that holds our bones together. There’s no rigid hinge there. In fact there’s a lot of fluidity and a lot of freedom of motion between the bones.”
Unlike the airbag or hovering aircraft systems, the super ball bot landing structure is also a roving system. Using the same globular network of poles and cables, the robot can get rolling and pick its way across the surface.
The bots will also need smart software that will allow them to "evolve," picking the right rules to guide them across unfamiliar terrain, all without constant direction from a human handler on Earth.
“The point of this is to create a landing system that can both act like an airbag ... and then once it’s landed, that very same structure can roll and move,” Sunspiral said.
One ideal place to send a team of rolling robots? Saturn's icy moon Titan.