Walking robots could be the future of Mars exploration

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We've sent wheeled rovers and even helicopters to Mars, but to explore its hidden depths, it will take robotic legwork.

If you’d been a fly on the wall at the Rockhal concert hall in Luxembourg in September 2022, you’d have been greeted by a strange sight: no bands or cheering crowds in sight, but rather an area filled with 220 tons of lava and rock, with teams of robots crawling across the dusty floor in search of resources.

An idea with legs Robots for Lunar Exploration The aspiring moon bots aren’t built from scratch; they start as commercially available robots from ANYbotics, which creates legged robots similar to those from Boston Dynamics. These models are mostly used for industrial inspections, but they could have potential for off-world exploration as well.

Kolvenbach compared it to the idea of CubeSats, a standardized interface and form factor that allows incorporation of different payloads, making development for space cheaper and making hardware reusable. These lava tubes are of great scientific interest, and there’s also a practical interest in using them as shelter for future crewed missions as astronauts could set up underground bases in them and be protected from dangerous radiation on the surface. But no one knows exactly what these environments are like, so any robot hoping to explore them would have to be versatile and able to handle unexpected challenges.

Working as a team Another way to approach the challenges of robotic exploration is to consider the possibilities of teamwork. With each legged robot being much smaller than a current Mars rover, several of them would be needed to carry the same payload as a single wheeled robot. But that can be an advantage, as the robots can work individually and as a team.

As for how a team of robots could communicate with each other, there are several approaches being considered in the robotics community. One is to have a central base that would coordinate the actions of each robot. That would be ideal for exploring large, open areas, as robots could be sent off in different directions to perform tasks like collecting samples, which could then be brought back to the base for analysis.

 

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