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Insect Robots For Mars Exploration
destructor writes "Thanks to these guys, I found this little robotic article. Aided by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, flying insect robots are looking at a life on our "little red planet", Mars in order to procure some atmospheric information and samples. Since conventional aircraft are unable to precisely navigate the Mars surface due to very thin air qualities, the robots actually have the ability to "move only their wings rapidly - while the body flies slowly", to ease sample collections." Space.com is carrying a piece on this.
so once big brother gets his hands on it, the tool of choise for personal privacy protection is going to be a fly swatter?
:)
I always get a kick out of these stories about robots being used on other planets. Anyone have a NASA link of these things being tried in some of our (Earth) extreme environment? Also, why don't we do these robot things on the moon first before we spend a billion or so going a few miles down the road?
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
... So when they there are bugs in NASA's program, they aren't kidding!
I'd still like to see people get sent to Mars though. It seems that they are almost counting on it not happening anymore. We can send all the research tools and robots we want. I think we still need to go there.
arc
If nature did not come up with flapping wings as a method of flight, how long would it have taken humanity to come up with the idea?
I wonder which embedded distro they plan to use?
Haven't they had enough problems controlling fairly large machines on that planet? Making a flying robot that flaps it's wings really fast to fly doesn't sound too reasonable. Maybe I have my planets wrong, but doesn't Mars experience some major storms every year. How much wind would it take to blow these things into a rock and smash them into tiny little pieces.
If you watch Nadesico at all, all the Characters that were born/lived on Mars are infected/gifted with worm-like nanites that live in their bodies. The nanites are the original exploratory and terraforming machinery in the story...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I liked thetumbleweed idea a lot more, though it's not so sexy. It seems like the odds of mechanical/electrical failures on a flyer are greater than the odds of our tumbleweed falling in a hole.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
With the present success of the robotic drones in Afghanistan, the idea of using some sort of similar robot to explore difficult environments is looking seriously promising.
There is of course the delay time in communication that makes it unlikely we'll be able to control the drones remotely from Earth - but that just makes it an interesting programing problem.
Seriously - cheap disposable robots that don't need the kinds of life support systems (or return flight ticket) that human exploration needs makes a ton more sense then sending up an expensive and non-expendable team.
Sure you don't get the kind of glamor exposure that a human explorer would get - but robots are clearly the best pragmatic and economical choice.
In illa quae ultra sunt
Okay, I know this is off-topic, but look at the headlines on the main page of space.com:
"NASA Report: Space Travel 'Inherently Hazardous' to Human Health"
Well, duh.
Its kind of frustrating with all the modern tech we have not to be able to track down a hiding enemy. Something like this could accomplish our mission a lot quicker and probably save a lot of lives.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
"Mars is a nasty place to fly a conventional air vehicle because almost everything there is working against you," said Anthony Colozza
To be fair, he does say almost everything. However, the first thing that comes to my mind when talking about flight is gravity. In that repect, Mars is a better friend than Earth to the airborne.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
we had better work out who owns it, etc.
The U.S. and the Russians are arguing over the I.S.S. already. This is why the Russians would not send up their cargo module.
It's gotten beyond the point of treaties for international peace saying "we all own space." No nation will go into space, and neither will any company go there, without some way of deriving profit.
Before anyone sets a toe down anywhere in the name of anything, let's figure this out.
Goat sex free since 2001
Wasn't there an episode of the X-Files with alien robotic cockroaches doing research on our people? Hmmm... Life imitates Art (or at least fiction).
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Anyone interested in 'insect-like' robots will want to do some reading on "B.E.A.M. Robotics", B.E.A.M. stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics. Bascially, it is the idea, codified by Mark Tilden (linus to beam roboticists (sp?)) that says that roboticists (sp?) should start by building/adapting simple autonimous robots, capable of small tasks. Each successive robot (the next one you build) should be slightly better. If we continue this (un?)natural evolution we should come up with life-like machines. Simple. Elegant. Capable.
See this Google search to start: http://www.google.com/search?q=beam+robotics
To we the appetite, here is a small gallery of Tilden's bots.
yeah... right... and than we use nanobots to build cities on Mars ;-)
Honestly.
This thing will not work very well in an environment that we don't know that much about. It'd be hard enough to get them to work here on Earth. That robot will be treated just as well as the insects are. Once they start to annoy anything or anyone, they're going to be attacked. They will also be greatly affected by weather, winds and such.
However, they will be good as "scouts" and watch out bugs. Let's say, a terraforming project finally has gone underway on Mars. These bugs will be great to have around to fly around the station and outside nearby the station. Let them go far away, they'll never make it back.
There is definately a good future for these things, as long as it doesn't start running a high bill.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
These would make great Christmas presents, but for Mars, how would one control these? You can't navigate directly, since the latency is too great. Do these have little insect-brains that allow you to give an instruction ("go to point b") and it takes care of the details of lifting off, flying while adjusting for turbulence and other atmospheric factors, and finally landing?
15 minutes later, you'd 'hear' back from the insect on how its trip went and where, exactly, it is.
Bah. What do I know...?
How would one power these small insect machines for extended periods of time? Does anyone know how they do this?
Am I the only one who thinks that there is a serious problem with the researchers getting a patent on this after being funded by NASA and the Georgia Insitute of Technology? If public money funds innovation, that innovation should be made public domain. Even if the details aren't made public domain, I shouldn't be prohibited from making and selling similar devices if I can build them. Scott
GUARD #1: Listen, in order to maintain air-speed velocity, an entomoper needs to beat its wings 43 times every second, right?
ARTHUR: Please!
GUARD #1: Am I right?
ARTHUR: I'm not interested!
GUARD #2: It could be carried by an African entomoper!
GUARD #1: Oh, yeah, an African entomoper maybe, but not a European swallow, that's my point.
The same is not true for smaller craft.
If a 747 "prangs" on landing, there are likely to be people injured or killed. On the other hand, smaller aircraft take hard landings rather a lot better.
Taking it to a more significant extreme, I used to fly radio controlled planes. The five pound 5 foot wingspan planes could take a pretty hard landing without damage. Move to an 8 footer weighing 15 pounds, and the plane is much more fragile.
Taking it in the other direction, it's probably impossible to kill an ant by dropping it from high altitude; there's not enough density for the terminal velocity to be too terribly high, and there's not enough mass for there to be much of an impact.
A "flying robot" is liable to be a bit bigger than an ant, but it's certainly down there in the "small scale" category. If it's made of tough materials, it should be quite resilient.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Now that we have these, we finally have a force capable of opposing his accursed dinobots.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You can find an artists conception of what these robots might look like in action here.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Since nobody else pointed this out, I will. This was suggested in an Episode (season 3) of the X-files. In the episode, a scientist theorized that explorations like a Mars expedition would be conducted by robots, and that creating robots to mimic insects was much more practical than making them mimic humans.
The episode further suggests that in fact this is how alien civilisations are exploring our planet.
No they haven't. AFAIK, all crafts that succeded in landing on the surface performed well beyond their design. Mars was russians nightmare, they send countless probes, and none (or a few) got there. States has only two major failures with crafts bound to Mars, it is just that those two were the last two missions to Mars.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The X-Plane web site has a description of some of the problems of conventional (non-flapping) flight on Mars. They also have flight models to allow simulation of flight. (However, the propulsion is a little unrealistic; maybe "muscles" would work better.)
If it isn't true, don't say it. If it isn't helpful, don't say it. If it's true and helpful, wait for the right time.
Season 3, episode 12. Ooooh, Bambi....
http://www.thexfiles.com/episodes/season3/3x12.htm l
This sounds more like a "Lets build an unorthodox. unusual and attention-getting device so we can attract supporters for the idea!" concept rather than a truly practical and realistic one. Sounds like a varitable CueCat of Mars exploration.
Being able to navigate in a particular direction isn't the issue. There are solutions to the navigation problem that are far cheaper, and yeild far better results than "insect robots". For example:
Balloons. Whats wrong with having a computer-controlled balloon with a cannister of hydrogen or helium beneath it? As local temperature and air pressure change, the computer could inflate or deflate accordingly. Toss in a good altimeter, and you can drift across the surface within a few feet for months on end. A small armada of these could cover a very wide area in a relatively short amount of time. It requires no propulsion, it will never run out of fuel, its a simple device that by its very design lessens the risk of mechanical failure, and its extremely cheap to produce and deploy.
If not balloons, why not use spring-loaded "grasshoppers" ? Essentially big wind-up toys, you can deploy thousands of these on the surface. They dont require intelligence, they dont consume fuel, and they dont require supervision of any sort. They simply pop around the surface taking photographs both on the ground and in the air, and when their spring begins to run low, they use the remainder of the spring's potential energy to broadcast the pictures and atmospheric data they recorded during their lifespan of hopping around Mars for a few weeks. Both of these ideas make sense, because when used in large groups, you can map enormous areas of terrain fairly well, like sending out guys in every direction at the beginning of a game of Command & Conquer. Once all the balloons (or grasshoppers) collect all their data, you can decide an interesting path for any subsequent rover to take.
I think this guy fails to realize that the more complicated his device becomes, the more risks of failure you encounter, the higher the pricetag becomes, and the more problems you'll have no way of addressing. As the old saying goes, "Keep it simple, stupid!". Sure, brainless observers & reporters arent nearly as glamorous as FLYING ROBOT INSECTS, but Mars exploration isnt about being able to license the design to Matchbox to sell miniatures of your invention to kids. Its about getting the job done as cheaply and reliably as possible.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I still have not heard a good arguement for why airships are not used in this scenario. Most of the volume/weight is acquired on-location making transport cheaper/easier and the skin of the ballon could be made of a photo-voltaic substance that could harvest light for operation.
-shpoffo
hopefully they can prop themselves up, or we will have a bunch of them wiggling about in vain.
they will change the way cities in Mars will be built in the process of getting these insectbots to do their jobs!!
I would think a small blimp, similar to those seen at hockey, basketball games, would work just as well and in fact be much cheaper. It can still hover, move side to side, etc, could transport video equipment, arms for picking up samples, etc. Isnt this like NASA, to create a billion dollar pen that writes upside down when you can just use a pencil?
Red Mars Is the first of a trilogy that deals with the terraforming (should I say aeroforming?) of Mars. A great read. Kim Stanley Robinson has done his homework on the science behind the effort. Yes, it is Science fiction, but the emphasis is on the first word.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
We're used to lag... so what's 15 minutes?
To pay for the exploration, let people buy the bugs. We control them, give them commands on where to go, what to do. Like any online game, you build clans and alliances, then wage war on other armies. Ok, maybe it wouldn't be good to be able to PK (or BK) other bugs since it's not easy to replace them and I suppose they won't be too cheap. Have some sort of power modules dropped around where our bugs can automatically home in on when they're low on energy, or just drop them ahead of the advancing army of bugs.
I bet within a year we'd have all of Mars explored.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
About 20 years ago, some of the AI types had a NASA conference where they proposed building self-replicating machines capable of building a moon base. By the year 2000. I asked, "How soon will you be able to do this in New Mexico?". They hated that.
Alright, suppose MASA (Mars Air and Space Administration) wanted to explore the big blue planet. Their engineers have low gravity, and look like floating octopi with heads full of hydrogen, so their first thought is obviously to make a convenient aerial surveilance system. It needs to be durable, with a hard structure, and capable of dissolving just about anything for fuel.....CRAP DON"T SWAT ANY FLIES.
For this reason, I suggest talking to the insects, to try to insure that our defeat by the martians will be swift and painless.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
(NO, I do not have any web citations!)
Actually the bee tale was for bumblebees, and the calculations were for the bumblebee _as if they were fixed-wing aircraft_, and, yes, as such the aerodynamics of bumblebees makes them worse gliders than the space shuttle (which has been characterized by its pilots as a brick with wings).
Scientists have a good understanding of the lift characteristics of bee wings (they trace a figure-8 and the tilt and shape determine direction and speed), though we lack the technology to make a working mechanism (this may be only a matter of time and persistance).
There's a full analysis of this folktale on the web somewhere, but I'm at work and don't have time to go looking for it to post a cite.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
send real insects to mars, they will adapt and return to earth and destroy everything
Nasa doesnt want the insects to take over Mars before they do.
Of course it's only to be expected of a website called "Cosmiverse" but these guys are awful at philology.
For the record: Wing is "pter" - pterodactyl means "wing finger", helicopter means "helical wing". The "entom" means insect - "en" means "in" and "tom" means "cut". ("Tom" also features in the word "atom", which means uncuttable.)
Insects are so called ("in" = "in", "sect" = cut, as in section) because they are segmented.
The "o" in the middle is just linguistic glue to stick the word together.
Sounds like a take out of the movie "Red Planet".
Populate mars with BUGS.