sciencetech-blog

comments

An army of small robots, trained to work like ants, could someday help us have our first encounter with alien life.

Nasa is developing the machines, dubbed 'swarmies', to land on a hostile planet and scan the soil for water, life or materials that could be turned into rocket fuel for astronauts.

Each swarmie has a webcam, WiFi antenna and GPS device. They work on their own to survey an area, then call the others over when they find a cache of something valuable.

Scroll down for video 

An army of tiny robots, trained to work like ants, could help us have our first encounter with alien life. Pictured is the Rassor robot, one swarmie design, which is able to collect resources from a planet's surface

This is identical to the way an ant colony gathers around a food source to divide up the task of collecting the food and taking it back to the nest.

Engineers have already developed programmes that tell the small, wheeled robots to go out in different directions and randomly search an area for a particular material.

For now, the testing is limited to parking lots around Kennedy's Launch Control Center using four homemade robots called 'swarmies' that resemble stripped-down radio-controlled trucks.

'We're entering the phase where we do a ton of trial runs and collect the data and that's well ahead of schedule,' said Cheryle Mako, an engineer at Kennedy who is leading the project.

Engineers have already developed programmes that tell the small, wheeled robots to go out in different directions and randomly search an area for a particular material. For now, the testing is limited to parking lots around Kennedy's Launch Control Center. If successful, swarmies could be used on exoplanets in the future

'From an investigation perspective, we are spot-on and have made great strides.'

Kurt Leucht, a Kennedy engineer working on the project, considers it possible that future missions could use this concept in a scaled-up way to develop an army of robots. 

'Assuming this pays off, we know somebody's going to take this and extend it and go beyond the four or five rovers we have here,' Mr Leucht said.

'So as we design this and work it through, we're mindful about things like minimising bandwidth.'

If testing is successful, the team plans to include the 'Rassor' design, an experimental mining robot designed at Kennedy to try out different techniques for digging into the lunar or Martian surfaces.

The swarmies work on their own to survey an area on an alien planet (artist's impression right), then call the others over when they find a cache of something valuable. This is identical to the way an ant colony gathers around a food source (left) to divide up the task of collecting the food and taking it back to the nest

Compared to the car-sized Curiosity rover operating on Mars now, the swarmies and Rassor are much smaller and built with only a couple of instruments.

'For a while people were interested in putting as much smarts and capability as they could on their one robot,' Mr Leucht said.

'Now people are realising you can have much smaller, much simpler robots that can work together and achieve a task.

'One of them can roll over and die and it's not the end of the mission because the others can still accomplish the task.'

Swarming robots could also be used on Earth. Assuming testing in the autumn goes well, the system can likely be called and modified for use in search and rescue tasks, with small robots heading out looking through the wreckage of a natural disaster or crash.

They also could make efficient inspectors of pipelines and water mains, she suggested.

'This would give you something smaller and cheaper that could always be running up and down the length of the pipeline so you would always know the health of your pipelines,' Ms Mako said.

'If we had small swarming robots that had a couple sensors and knew what they were looking for, you could send them out to a leak site and find which area was at greatest risk.'

Nasa's Kurt Leucht, from left, is working with undergraduate intern Gil Montague and post-graduate intern Karl Stolleis to develop the software that will control independent robots in a way that mimics the process ants use