Tag: bio-mimicry

Mars exploration vehicles typically have wheels, allowing them to traverse some challenging terrain on the Red Planet. However, eventually, their systems start to wear down, and one of their wheels gets stuck. The “Free Spirit” campaign in 2009 was the most widely known case. Unfortunately, that campaign wasn’t successful, and now, 15 years later, Spirit remains stuck in its final resting place. Things might have been different if NASA had adopted a new robot paradigm developed by Guangming Chen and his colleagues at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics Lab of Locomotion Bioinspiration and Intelligent Robots. They devised a robot based on a desert lizard, with adaptable feet and a flexible “spine” that, according to their calculations, would be well suited to traversing over Martian regolith.