NASA’s Creepy Robotic Snake Might Slither Round Alien Worlds

A brand new robotic has joined NASA’s assortment of strange mechanical beings that traverse throughout different planets in quest of life. However in contrast to the same old autonomous machines formed like SUVs or tiny helicopters, this one is lengthy, slithery—and hella creepy.

A staff of engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has created a snake-shaped robotic that may slide its manner down by way of slim vents beneath the floor of icy worlds, in response to the space agency.

“There are dozens of textbooks about the right way to design a four-wheel car, however there isn’t any textbook about the right way to design an autonomous snake robotic to boldly go the place no robotic has gone earlier than,” Hiro Ono, EELS principal investigator at JPL, mentioned within the NASA assertion. “We now have to put in writing our personal. That’s what we’re doing now.”

The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS for brief, is at present being examined at JPL in order that it could possibly sooner or later make its manner by way of varied terrains on Earth, the Moon, and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Scientists consider the icy moon may include indicators of life in its subsurface oceans.

“It has the potential to go to areas the place different robots can’t go,” JPL’s Matthew Robinson, EELS mission supervisor, mentioned within the NASA assertion. “Although some robots are higher at one specific sort of terrain or different, the concept for EELS is the power to do all of it.”

The first EELS prototype was built in 2019, and since then the team behind the robot has been conducting field tests every month to refine its software and hardware so that it can operate autonomously. “When you’re going places where you don’t know what you’ll find, you want to send a versatile, risk-aware robot that’s prepared for uncertainty—and can make decisions on its own,” Robinson said.

EELS stretches 13 feet (4 meters) long and weighs about 220 pounds (100 kilograms). The snake-like bot is made up of “10 identical segments that rotate, using screw threads for propulsion, traction, and grip,” NASA wrote in its statement. The robot snake has been tested in different environments with snow, sand, and ice, including the Mars Yard at JPL (a “robot playground” created at a ski resort in Southern California) and at a local indoor ice rink.

NASA engineers designed EELS to autonomously sense its environment and calculate risk, as well as recover on its own. “Imagine a car driving autonomously, but there are no stop signs, no traffic signals, not even any roads. The robot has to figure out what the road is and try to follow it,” Rohan Thakker, the project’s autonomy lead, said in the statement. “Then it needs to go down a 100-foot drop and not fall.”

EELS is equipped with four pairs of stereo cameras and LiDAR, which uses laser pulses to create a 3D map of its surroundings. The robot uses that map to figure out the safest path forward with its navigation algorithm. The team members will get to decide in the future which science instruments they want their snake robot to have.

“Our focus so far has been on autonomous capability and mobility, but eventually we’ll look at what science instruments we can integrate with EELS,” Robinson said. “Scientists tell us where they want to go, what they’re most excited about, and we’ll provide a robot that will get them there. How? Like a startup, we just have to build it.”

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