How do you make a robot from Mars? It’s a tough challenge

At the hands of the population rover, which landed on Mars in 1997, to Perseverance touched in FebruaryThe robots of the Red Planet have a distinctive feature: the wheels. Walking is much more stable and energy efficient than walking, even Earth’s robots are still struggle for dominance. After all, NASA would hate to flip its very expensive Mars explorer and look like a turtle on its back.

The problem with wheels, however, is that they move: like steep mountains, to explore the intricate terra of Mars, you need the types of legs that evolution gave to animals on Earth. So, a team of scientists from the Swiss ETH Institute for Solar System Research in Zurich and Germany’s ETH have been playing small quadrupedal robot call SpaceBok, designed to mimic the antelope known as the springbok.

True to his name, a real-life springbok bounce around the deserts of Africa, perhaps to confuse predators. The original concept of the robot, which was introduced in 2018, was to jump to the surface of the moon, just as astronauts have done to locomotive it in the weak gravity of the moon. This may work on our satellite, where the landscape is relatively flat, but Mars is too dangerous when viewed in complex terrain, as it is full of sand, rocks, and steep slopes. So now researchers are changing their limbs and trajectories to see if they are capable of handling wilder landscapes.

In these new experiments, the team programmed SpaceBok with more traditional routes, with no more spring routes. Specifically, the researchers wanted to compare two types: a “static” trajectory, in which at least three bodies are in contact with the earth at any given time, and a “dynamic” trajectory in which more than one body can leave the earth. immediately. The first is more methodical, but the second is more efficient because it allows the robot to move faster.

The researchers also wore versions of SpaceBok with two types of feet: point and plane. The pointed feet have a small surface, resembling a real spring shoe. Flat feet, on the other hand, are flat rotating circles that bend at an angle when the feet make contact with the ground. Think of it as snow boots rather than shoes. Or really, they are like snowshoes because their feet are littered with projections that help hold them to the ground.

After the researchers had different configurations of routes and feet that could be used to customize the robot, they released it into a huge curved sandbox filled with material approaching the ground found on Mars. Thus, they could test whether one of these configurations allowed the robot to lift a 25-degree shot. By controlling the robot’s energy use, they could quantify how efficient each walk and foot configuration was.

In one new prepress describe the work that has been approved for publication in the journal Field Robotics, showed that the machine can skillfully and efficiently climb a simulated Martian hill without falling. “We wanted to show that these systems, which work in a dynamic way today, can walk on the sand of Mars,” says Hendrik Kolvenbach, an ETH Zurich robotics researcher. “Now it’s a technology that has a lot of potential for the future.”