Category: Robots

Humans finally achieved controlled flight on another planet for the first time just a few years ago. Ingenuity, the helicopter NASA sent to Mars, performed that difficult task admirably. It is now taking a well-deserved rest until some intrepid human explorer someday comes by to pick it up and hopefully put it in a museum somewhere. But what if, instead of a quadcopter, NASA used a series of flexible-wing robots akin to bees to explore the Martian terrain? That was the idea behind the Marsbee proposal by Chang-Kwon Kang and his colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The project was supported by a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant back in 2018 – let’s see what they did with it.

Robotic companions are a mainstay of sci-fi series everywhere. From R2D2 to Johnny 5, these characters typically have a supporting role in the story and are helpful to their human companions. But what if they were integral to the humans in the story? So much so that they couldn’t live without their robotic compatriots? That’s the idea behind Biobot, which was given a NIAC grant in 2018 – why not use a robotic companion to carry supporting equipment on human extravehicular activities (EVAs) on other planets?

Utilizing regolith on the Moon or Mars, especially to refill propellant for rockets to get back off the surface, is a common theme in the more engineering-minded space exploration community. There have been plenty of proof-of-concept technologies that could move us toward that goal. One of the best supported was the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR). Let’s take a look at what made this project unique.

In-situ testing for space equipment is complex when it has to be developed on Earth, which is the case for literally all of it, at least for now. Typically, engineers and scientists developing the next Lunar or Martian robotic explorer would seek out exotic destinations that, while they look like they fit on another planet, were just more exotic parts of ours. The robotics team at DLR, Germany’s space agency, decided they could do better. So they built a 1500 sq meter test bed for their upcoming Martian and Lunar exploration bots.

Maglevs are one of those technologies that still look like magic, even years after they were initially rolled out. While they have long been a workhorse of the transportation systems of some major cities, they don’t often impact the day-to-day lives of people who don’t use them to commute. But, they might be invaluable in another setting – lunar exploration. There’s an ongoing debate about the best way to shuttle stuff around on the Moon’s surface, and a team from JPL and a company called SRI International think they have a solution – deploy a maglev track on the Moon.