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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?
:)
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.
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
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.
From what I understand, we still don't fully understand how flapping wings fully work. Until recently, calculations on the lift provided by bees wings showed that they should crash and burn. I think, though, that without flapping-winged animals, we could have gotten there by studying fish, whose flexible bodies have far better propulsion than any of our fixed-shape vehicles nowadays.
Anyway, more on-topic, I love the fact that they're so small - NASA could put a few thousand in a single payload, and even if 90% fail, we'd be able to closely map a *lot* of Mars' surface. I was thinking, though, that a better design might be something more grasshopper-like? In the low gravity and pressure, you'd think this would make more sense than trying to design something to fly, and take less energy than constant wing movement.
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