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12/09/2008
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Small, palm sized, six legged robots have been developed by NASA to function cooperatively in order to undertake construction, repair, exploration, search and rescue activities in space.
Looking remarkably like the “Replicators” in the TV “Stargate” science fiction series, the new “SpiderBots” are presently able to crawl on a flexible, rectangular mesh in micro gravity, walk on a flat surface and assemble simple structures. Each leg includes two spring compliant joints and a gripping actuator. The devices move in a hard-coded set of tripod gaits involving the alternating motion of two sets of three legs between anchored and not anchored to mesh states.
The robots were recently tested on a reduced gravity aircraft and were able to demonstrate crawling along the mesh during the microgravity portion of the parabolic flight. In one contemplated improvement, feedback from sensors on the feet would provide indications or success or failure to grip the mesh, thus contributing to robust, fault tolerant operation.
This work was undertaken by Alberto Behar, Neville Marzwell, Jaret Matthews, and Krandalyn Richardson of Caltech; Jonathan Wall and Michael Poole of Blue Sky Robotics; David Foor of Texas A&M University; and Damian Rodgers of ISU (International Space University) for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
For more information: http://www.techbriefs.com/content/view/3137/34/
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Author
Tom Shelley
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