Bad news if you should move to the Moon or Mars: housing is somewhat hard to come back by. Fortunately, NASA (as as all the time) is considering ahead, and has just shown off a self-assembling robotic structure which may just be a vital a part of moving off-planet.
Published today in Science Robotics, the paper from NASA Ames Research Center describes the creation and testing of what they call “self-reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials,” which is a highly precise solution to describe a constructing that builds itself.
“We expect one of these construction technology can serve a number of very general applications,” said lead creator Christine Gregg. “Within the near term, the robust autonomy and light-weight structures of our approach strongly profit applications in austere environments, just like the lunar surface or space. This includes lunar surface construction of communication towers and shelters, which will likely be needed before astronauts arrive, in addition to on orbit structures like booms and antennas.”
The essential idea of the self-building structure is in a clever synergy between the constructing material — cuboctahedral frames they call voxels — and the 2 kinds of robots that assemble them.
One form of robot walks along the surface with two legs, seemingly inspired by our own biology’s kinesin transport molecules, carrying a voxel like a backpack. When that’s put in place, a fastening robot that lives within the frame itself like a worm slithers over and tightens the reversible attachment points. Neither one needs a strong sensing system, and the way in which they work means high precision will not be required either.
You possibly can see a pair of walkers and a fastener worm in most of the pictures on this post. And here’s a transport walker handing off a voxel to a placement walker, with the fastener bot lurking below waiting to go over and lock the frame into position.
Two robots exchange a structural element while a 3rd waits below to affix it to the lattice.
The form of the pieces allows them to be attached at various angles while maintaining good structure strength. You almost certainly wouldn’t need to store rocks on top of a dome made out of this stuff, but they’d be excellent as a base on which so as to add insulation and sealant to make a dwelling.
“We expect one of these construction is especially suited to long duration and/or very large infrastructure, including habitats, instrumentation, or every other infrastructure on orbit or the surface of the moon (utility towers, vehicle landing facilities),” said co-author Kenneth Cheung. “For us, the structures and all the robotic systems are resources that might be optimized over space and time. It looks like there’ll all the time be situations where the optimal thing is to depart just structure in place (and maybe visit to examine it with a robot periodically), so we began with that.”
The pieces themselves may be constructed on site, Gregg noted:
“The voxels might be produced from many various materials and manufacturing processes. Eventually, for space applications, we would love to make voxels from materials we discover in situ on the moon or other planetary bodies.”
In fact, these videos of the robots at work are highly accelerated, but unlike work in a factory or sidewalk, speed isn’t necessarily of the essence with regards to constructing stuff in space or on the surface of one other planet.
“Our robots can work faster than shown on this paper, but we didn’t see it as critical to the first goals to make them accomplish that. Fundamentally, the solution to make this method work faster is to make use of more robots,” said Cheung. “The general strategy for scalability (of speed, size) is to give you the chance to push the complexity of scale onto algorithms, for planning and scheduling in addition to detecting faults and performing repairs.”
The robots developed by the lab took 256 voxels and assembled them right into a passable shelter structure during a complete of 4.2 days of labor. Here’s what the beginning of that looked like (again, nowhere near real time):
Image Credits: NASA
If we’d sent them ahead to Mars or the Moon a 12 months ahead of a crew, they may construct a dozen such structures twice the scale with time to spare. Or perhaps they may affix the needed plating to the surface afterwards and seal it up — that’s fairly beyond the scope of the paper published today, but an obvious next step.
Though the robots have tethers running power to them on this lab environment, they’re being designed with battery operation or on-site power in mind. The fastener bot is already battery-powered, and the researchers are considering ways of keeping the walkers charged between and even during operations.
“We envision robots may very well be autonomously recharged at power stations and even perhaps beamed power wirelessly. As you mentioned, power may be routed through the structure itself, which is perhaps useful for outfitting the structure in addition to powering the robots,” Gregg said.
Versions of the robot have already flown in space and done work in microgravity, so no worries on that rating. And there’s nothing in principle stopping them from working in non-Earth gravities just like the Moon’s. That said, this is barely the start — like revealing the existence of 2x4s and nails.
“The subsequent versions of our robots for the laboratory environment will likely be faster and more reliable, based on our lessons learned with the primary versions. We’re very occupied with understanding how several types of constructing blocks might be integrated into the structures to supply functional outfitting,” Gregg said.
Likewise research will proceed on structures employing swarms of robots, not only a handful; a crude shelter might take two walkers 4 days, but something ten times greater might take 100 times longer. But many hands — especially robotic ones — make light work.
