MIT’s WORMS new modular Lunar robot consists of worm-like articulated legs.
When astronauts begin to build a permanent base on the moon in the coming years, they’ll need help from robots that could potentially do the heavy lifting by laying cables, deploying solar panels, erecting communications towers, and building habitats.
To avoid a bottleneck of bots, a team of MIT engineers is designing a kit of universal robotic parts that an astronaut could easily mix and match to rapidly configure different robot “species” to fit various missions on the moon.
Once a mission is completed, a robot can be disassembled and its parts used to configure a new robot to meet a different task.
“Taking our inspiration from LEGO and also from diverse animals such as spiders, goats, oxen and penguins, we designed a modular mobility system that would support the field attachment of WORMS mobility elements to large infrastructural modules as well as field reconfiguration of the worm-like modular elements from one animal-like robot to another.”
source MIT
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