Imagine dozens or even hundreds of small, collapsable robots, weighing only a few kilograms a piece, will be conveniently packed during launch and would reliably separate and unpack at their destination. Such teams will allow rapid, reliable in-situ exploration of hazardous destination such as Titan, where imprecise terrain knowledge and unstable precipitation cycles make single-robot exploration problematic.Tensegrity offers inspirations for new robotic architectures that meet NASA's needs. First is its holistic approach--tensegrity inculcates a great-circle way of thinking, generating possible "round" robots and other innovative form factors. Second is tensegrity's potential for light-weighting, as its separation of tension and compression enables the use of highly efficient materials. Third is biomimicry, the imitation of biological systems that are already structured prestressed tensegrities.
These robots can be light-weight, absorb strong impacts, are redundant against single-point failures, can recover from different landing orientations and are easy to collapse and uncollapse. We believe tensegrity robot technology can play a critical role in future planetary exploration.
In a BBC interview, Vytas Sunspiral said:
You can imagine that dropping one of these on the surface of an alien world would certainly be a lot easier than landing the existing types of robotic rovers with all their precision engineered wheels, motors and instruments. Past missions, such as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, used airbags to cushion their landings. Because of its hefty size, Nasa’s Curiosity had to be lowered on cables using its elaborate sky-crane system. “Drop one of those rovers 30 feet,” says Agogino, “do you think it’s going to be very happy about it?”
But existing planetary rovers are shaped the way they are for a reason: they need wheels to move around, bodies to hold equipment and arms to deploy instruments or cameras. So how do you do that with a glorified bundle of beads, rods and elastic? “We get a lot of our inspiration from biological systems,” says Sunspiral, who suggests a mechanism that mimics how our own muscles expand and contract could offer one solution. “You could shorten and lengthen the cables to cause the whole thing to roll and move around.”
UPDATE: A recent Google Talk by Sunspiral on soft robotics in general (thanks to J. Bruce for calling out the need for a better video link here):
Links
[1] Time magazine, 10 Wild Newly Funded Projects
[2] Original NASA proposal, Super Ball Bot - Structures for Planetary Landing and Exploration
[3] BBC Interview, the crazy robot lab
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق