The Right Stuff
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The Right Stuff
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Need inspiration for your next project? Take a look at the next generation of robot space explorers.
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Elsewhere on the Web
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• Space.com
• Cool Robot Of The Week
• GMD's Collection of Snake-like Robots
• JPL Robotics
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For the first time in history, mankind is finally taking up permanent residency in space on the International Space Station, orbiting some 230 miles above our planet. At the same time, NASA officials just announced plans for robot exploration of Mars. Six missions will be sent to the planet during this decade, starting with the 2001 Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and continuing with the launch of two robotic surface rovers in 2003, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005 and lander in 2007. Last year's failures - Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander - introduced quite a few changes in the agency's "faster, better, cheaper" approach to space exploration. New missions won't be as fast or as cheap as the recent ones; however, NASA's engineers are designing new and innovative robots that will try to unravel the secrets of the red planet's past environments, the presence of water sources, and evidence of past or present life. Several research labs are fostering unusual - some might even call it weird - ideas on how to explore the cosmos in the years to come.
Researchers at the Department of Energys Sandia National Laboratories are developing a hopping machine inspired by the jumping of grasshoppers. The fact that hydrocarbon fuels provide much greater energy densities than batteries was quickly put to the practical use: a small combustion-powered hopper theoretically could travel greater distances and clear larger obstacles. One of the experimental machines jumps 3 feet high and 6 feet from its starting point on each jump and can travel roughly five miles on a single tank of gas, which is only about 20 grams of fuel! Other prototypes use a combustion-driven piston to make leaps as high as 20 feet. The steering algorithms are easier to implement because of the longer time available to make corrections after each jump. The robot itself is contained inside a grapefruit-sized plastic shell. A microprocessor inside the hopper reads an internal compass, and a gimbal mechanism rotates the offset-weighted internal workings so that the hopper rolls around until it is pointed in the desired direction. When the contact with the ground is detected, combustion chamber fires, the piston punches the ground, and the hopper leaps.
Self-healing minefield, with hopping mines that sense enemy's mine-clearing operations and cooperate with each other to fill gaps, is one of the less exciting and more down-to-earth applications of this technology. But scientists want to see it go on Mars and the moon - you could go much farther from the lander with dozen of these to search in all directions.
American space agency is now working on a humanoid system called Robonaut. It can be described as a copy of the human's upper torso dressed in a spacewalking suit, equipped with two arms, two five-fingered hands (with over 150 thermal, position, tactile, force and torque sensors per arm), and a head. This humanoid can mimic and duplicate the exact motions of human operator located elsewhere, thus meeting NASA's increasing requirements for Extravehicular Activity (EVA, or spacewalks). Robonaut uses a centralized approach to data management, bringing all feedback to a central nervous system, where even low-level servo control is performed. It will be assigned to the International Space Station, ready for service sometime before the end of the decade.
Another group at NASAs Ames Research Center is developing a snake-like robot that can crawl, coil, climb and grasp. Such "serpentine robots" consist of chains of simple, low degree of freedom modules that collectively form a highly flexible, hyper-redundant robot. These robots could easily handle rough terrain that would stop conventional wheeled rovers. They may be perfect for exploring other worlds or zero-gravity space construction sites, breaking into smaller segments to fan out across the surface before regrouping.
NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) funds far-reaching ideas that will be started some 10 to 40 years from now. Steve Dubowsky, one of the researchers working there, is developing self-transforming robotic planetary explorers. Each part of his STX robot will be a mini computer capable of communicating with every other part - a kind of small-scaled WWW. Phase I of his study demonstrated the addition of small-scale binary actuation (2-4 binary states) to enhance conventional fixed configuration robots with some limited configuration change. The projection into 30 to 40 years would be a system of very large-scale binary actuation (103 to 104 binary states) which can also deliver the changing topology necessary for truly effective planetary robots. Ultimately, we will just drop CTXs to the planet surface, and it will transform itself to the appropriate device.
Thomas W. Vaneck of Physical Sciences Inc. is developing a system of biomimetic roboswimmers for exploration and search of life on the Jovian moon Europa. This concept involves numerous small (around 10 cm), autonomous, robotic swimmers which as individuals and as a cooperative group sense the ice, ocean, and sea floor environment and measure the physicochemical properties characterizing the presence of life. Other institutions are also working on similar projects, including the Micro-Air Vehicle Entomopter Project from Georgia Tech Research Institute and a Micromechanical Flying Insect from the University of California. More details on other NIAC's robotic projects can be found following this link.
Professor Kumar Ramohalli and his students at University of Arizona are working on the Locally Refueled Planetary Explorer (LORPEX), an innovative and unique robot that combines high-tech robotics technology with In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). This "refillable" robot has the ability to generate quick power bursts by utilizing fuel produced from the local resources. The solid oxide ISRU unit extracts oxygen and a simple fuel (carbon monoxide) from the Martian atmosphere, using solar energy produced by on-board photovoltaic cells. Approximately 1 kg of propellant can be produced every 10 days, enabling "power-on-demand" activities such as deep subsurface drilling, hopping over obstacles, hovering and sample return missions.
Space is becoming a true business frontier for the people at LunaCorp. It was founded in 1989 by business executives, scientists, and former NASA officials to pursue private space exploration in the face of dwindling government budgets and fading vision.The company is gathering key players - companies like RadioSchack that recently announced its support for this initiative - for a series of lunar adventures based on intelligent robots that will deliver live video and wide-open interactivity to the public. LunaCorp and the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University are developing IceBreaker, a rover that will confirm if the ice exists at the lunar poles. It will land in late 2003 near the Moon's South Pole, carrying instruments to investigate the ice that may exist in permanently shadowed craters according to the data gathered by Lunar Prospector. Follow-on rovers will be sent on a Grand Apollo Tour of historic lunar sites. Each of them will carry a powerful vision system, tracking everything above and around them. Video signal and motion data will be transmitted to science centers and planetariums with LunaCorp exhibitions, allowing for a true telepresence experience for people back on Earth. They will also contain Web server hardware, so people from around the globe can link directly to the lunar surface. Various AI-techniques will be employed to protect these robots from potentionally unsafe commands. Hundreds of telephone, chat and e-mail sessions will be handled automatically by the on-board hardware, transofming every LunaCorp user to a virtual space explorer.