Sending 1 kilogram to Mars will set you back roughly $2.4 million, judging by the cost of the Perseverance mission. If you want to pack up supplies and gear for every conceivable contingency, you\u2019re going to need a lot of those kilograms.<\/p>\n
But what if you skipped almost all that weight and only took a do-it-all Swiss Army knife instead? That\u2019s exactly what scientists at NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University are testing with robots, algorithms, and highly advanced building materials.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe concept of zero mass exploration is rooted in self-replicating machines, an engineering concept John von Neumann conceived in the 1940s\u201d, says Kenneth C. Cheung, a NASA Ames researcher. He was involved in the new study published recently in Science Robotics covering self-reprogrammable metamaterials\u2014materials that do not exist in nature and have the ability to change their configuration on their own. \u201cIt\u2019s the idea that an engineering system can not only replicate, but sustain itself in the environment,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Based on this concept, Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the 1980s proposed a self-replicating interstellar spacecraft called the Von Neumann probe that would visit a nearby star system, find resources to build a copy of itself, and send this copy to another star system. Rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe technology of reprogrammable metamaterials [has] advanced to the point where we can start thinking about things like that. It can\u2019t make everything we need yet, but it can make a really big chunk of what we need,\u201d says Christine E. Gregg, a NASA Ames researcher and the lead author of the study.<\/p>\n
One of the key problems with Von Neumann probes was that taking elements found in the soil on alien worlds and processing them into actual engineering components was resource-intensive and required huge amounts of energy. The NASA Ames team solved that with using prefabricated \u201cvoxels\u201d\u2014standardized reconfigurable building blocks.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The system derives its operating principles from the way nature works on a very fundamental level. \u201cThink how biology, one of the most scalable systems we have ever seen, builds stuff,\u201d says Gregg. \u201cIt does that with building blocks. There are on the order of 20 amino acids which your body uses to make proteins to make 200 different types of cells and then combines trillions of those cells to make organs as complex as my hair and my eyes. We are using the same strategy,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
To demo this technology, they built a set of 256 of those blocks\u2014extremely strong 3D structures made with a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer called StattechNN-40CF. Each block had fastening interfaces on every side that could be used to reversibly attach them to other blocks and form a strong truss structure.<\/p>\n
A truss structure with approximately one square meter cross section made with these voxels had an average failure load of more than 9,000 Newtons, which means it could hold more than 900 kilograms despite being incredibly light itself (its density is just 0.0103 grams per cubic centimeter). \u201cWe took these voxels out in backpacks and built a boat, a shelter, a bridge you could walk on. The backpacks weighed around 18 kilograms. Without technology like that, you wouldn\u2019t even think about fitting a boat and a bridge in a backpack,\u201d says Cheung. \u201cBut the big thing about this study is that we implemented this reconfigurable system autonomously with robots,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
In a lab experiment, three robots used all 256 voxels to assemble a shelter in four and a half days. The first robotic team member was a cargo handler that transported the voxels from the supply area to the right place on the structure under construction. Once there, the cargo robot handed the voxels over to a crane robot that placed them exactly where they needed to be. Finally, a fastening robot moving inside the structure attached each new voxel to the structure.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The robots oriented themselves exclusively using internal reference frames\u2014they basically counted the voxels they stepped on. This meant no vision, no lidar, no advanced sensors or control systems. \u201cIn this demo, the structure was preplanned. The preplanning resolves robots bumping into each other or whether the structure is stable as it is being built. We can do that automatically,\u201d says Cheung. \u201cBut we also tried models like finite state automata, which is how ants build their colonies. This way we could solve high-level problems like finding something and building an enclosure around it,\u201d he claims.<\/p>\n
The system is scalable in the sense that, with more voxels, structures can be made larger; with more robotic teams, they can be assembled faster. The first real-world application the team aims at is building towers on the Moon.<\/p>\n
The towers are needed because the landing site for the Artemis 3, a mission intended to bring human astronauts back to the silver globe, is near the Moon\u2019s south pole. \u201cThe Sun angle there is low, so to maximize the amount of sunlight, you should put the solar panels as high as possible. You can\u2019t bounce radio waves off the atmosphere because there is no atmosphere, so you need line of sight for communications. The antennas, too, must be as high as possible,\u201d says Cheung.<\/p>\n
The height of the towers in this location must be over 100 meters to get the job done, and pulling that off with current deployment systems would be very difficult. So, the team is now focused on demonstrating how their building blocks and robots could be used in building communication and solar towers on the Moon. \u201cOur next papers are exactly about that. They are coming out in March,\u201d says Gregg.<\/p>\n
Science Robotics, 2024. DOI: 10.1126\/scirobotics.adi2746<\/p>\n
Jacek Krywko is a science and technology writer based in Olsztyn, Poland. He covers space exploration and artificial intelligence research.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Correction: math on the structure\u2019s density has been fixed.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sending 1 kilogram to Mars will set you back roughly $2.4 million, judging by the cost of the Perseverance mission. If you want to pack up supplies and gear for every conceivable contingency, you\u2019re going to need a lot of those kilograms. But what if you skipped almost all that weight and only took a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5517,4335,4849],"class_list":["post-45473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-materials-science","tag-robotics","tag-space-exploration"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}