In 2022, NASA challenged students to develop robotic systems that can move across extreme terrain, without the use of wheels.Ī team from MIT's Space Resources Workshop took up the challenge, aiming specifically for a lunar robot design that could navigate the extreme terrain of the moon's South Pole-a landscape that is marked by thick, fluffy dust steep, rocky slopes and deep lava tubes. WORMS was conceived in 2022 as an answer to NASA's Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge-an annual competition for university students to design, develop, and demonstrate a game-changing idea. Last week, they presented their results at IEEE's Aerospace Conference, where they also received the conference's Best Paper Award. Lordos' team has built and demonstrated a six-legged WORMS robot. The design is flexible, sustainable, and cost-effective." "Astronauts could go into the shed, pick the worms they need, along with the right shoes, body, sensors and tools, and they could snap everything together, then disassemble it to make a new one. candidate and graduate instructor in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), in reference to the independent, articulated robots that carry their own motors, sensors, computer, and battery. "You could imagine a shed on the moon with shelves of worms," says team leader George Lordos, a Ph.D. The same parts could be reconfigured into six-legged spider bots that can be lowered into a lava tube to drill for frozen water. ![]() Depending on the mission, parts can be configured to build, for instance, large "pack" bots capable of carrying heavy solar panels up a hill. The system's parts include worm-inspired robotic limbs that an astronaut can easily snap onto a base, and that work together as a walking robot. The team calls the system WORMS, for the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System. Once a mission is completed, a robot can be disassembled and its parts used to configure a new robot to meet a different task. ![]() 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.
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