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Swarming And Hopping Planetary Robots

Posted by Zonk on from the game-over-man-game-over dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Recently Dr. Penelope Boston (U. New Mexico) and Dr. Steven Dubowsky (MIT) discussed their NASA advances to develop 'hopping microbots' capable of exploring hazardous terrain, including underground caves and planetary extremes. 'We came up with the idea of many, many, tiny little spheres, about the size of tennis balls (slide show), that essentially hop, almost like Mexican jumping beans. They store up muscle energy, so to speak, and then they boink themselves off in various directions. That's how they move...They behave as a swarm [of 1000s]. They relate to each other using very simple rules, but that produces a great deal of flexibility in their collective behavior that enables them to meet the demands of unpredictable and hazardous terrain.' Test prototypes available in March will initially explore terrestrial lava tubes."

7 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Aeon Flux? by tbcpp · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is it just me, or have these people been watching Aeon Flux a little to much? Haven't seen the movie, but the scene from the trailer of the hundreds of explosive balls running down the hall comes to mind.

    --
    Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
  2. Boink.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yet again, scientific progress goes "boink".

  3. Poor choice of words? by core+plexus · · Score: 4, Funny
    "...and then they boink themselves off..."

    Let the adolescent humor begin!

    Iceworms are real

    1. Re:Poor choice of words? by sourcery · · Score: 5, Funny

      Moral of the story: It takes balls to go cave exploring on alien worlds.

      --
      Cthulhu for President! Why settle for the lesser evil?
  4. What would Heisenberg think? by nickgrieve · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I like this idea. Personally, I think that remote planetary rover designers often put the cart before the horse. We often send the robotic equivalent of (evolutionary speaking) contemporary insects out to explore planets, when perhaps we should look at methods employed by fungus, plants, one celled organisms for inspection for somewhat to more so reliable designs...

    As for Heisenburg,... I can see a lot of NASA guys sitting around the data feeds... "hrmm... it seems that the surface of venus is covered in 1000's of pock marks the size of tennis balls..." :-)

  5. Galactic boinking by HermanAB · · Score: 4, Funny

    At least, this one thing that Douglas Adams didn't think of.

    --
    Oh well, what the hell...
  6. balls roll down by tronicum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I like the idea but if it just a swarm of balls, they might inspect a cave one time only. If like 1000 Balls hop arround and 200 explore a cave, they might all roll down into a big hole all together. They need some rover or insect like master that collects their sensor information. If they are the size of a tennis ball they can't store much energy and can not send their data for long distance.