DailyDirt: Biomimicry In Space
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Robot designs often steal from nature. Roboticists have created all kinds of insect-inspired bots and bots based on birds, lizards and mammals. It’s easy to see how these robots fit into our world because animals with similar silhouettes are already everywhere. But it’s not so intuitive that biomimicry should work in the low gravity environment of space. Without any alien life forms to cheat off, it looks like we’re going to try to find out how some bio-inspired robots adapt to extraterrestrial locations.
- An unmanned mission to explore the moon could include the use of an ape-like robot that can walk/crawl on the lunar surface. It looks cool, but a robot with four complex limbs doesn’t seem to be the easiest bot to maintain in space. Keep It Simple, Scientists! [url]
- Norway’s SINTEF Research Institute is developing a snake-like robot to explore the surface of Mars. A snake bot could team up with a conventional rover design and help the rover if its wheels ever get stuck in the sandy Martian landscape. [url]
- SpiderFab is a satellite-building concept where structures are built in space like a spider weaving its web. This kind of satellite construction would allow for larger and more complex designs, and assembling parts in space using a spider-inspired robot could be demonstrated in the next 3-4 years (optimistically). [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: biomimicry, mars, moon, robots, rover, satellite, sintef, snake bot, space, spiderfab, unmanned
Comments on “DailyDirt: Biomimicry In Space”
Ape robot?
Why not just make a more humanoid robot? Bipedal locomotion is harder, but if they’re shooting for the moon anyway…
Ah, NASA... Still on the cutting edge of decades-old concepts.
“SpiderFab, for cryin’ out loud. I think O’Neill’s people dreamed up a beam extruding space station-assembling robot (similar to how custom rain gutters are fabricated onsite) back in the ’70s or ’80s. Seems like they even built a proof of concept prototype. Maybe NASA should check their files.
Or read a little science fiction. As I recall, the concept showed up as “shelobs” in the Niven et al novel Falling Angels in ’91– just 22 years ago. At this rate, NASA might even come up with the idea of habitats and craft constructed of high tensile strength fabric and inflated with expanding foam (and carved out to create living and working space) in another 10-20 years. I know that idea showed up in SF in the mid ’90s, and again in my own novel Net Assets a decade ago (before Bigelow’s inflatable “space hotel”) (Fee download – http://www.bussjaeger.org/index.html#netassets).
Ape robot.
And the actual url of the people doing it, instead of a silly CNet gallery.
http://robotik.dfki-bremen.de/en/research/projects/istruct.html
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