A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is testing a 3D-printed Transformer-like new robot, Shapeshifter, which is capable of morphing into multiple configurations. And it is stated that a similar design could one day be leveraged to explore Saturn’s moon Titan.
Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most potential targets on any planetary scientist’s list for exploration. But any mission to Titan will have to deal with an environment unlike any other – frigid temperatures, cryovolcanoes, caves, and lakes, seas, and rain of liquid hydrocarbons. However, the latest concept could encompass 12 mini robots – cobots (Collaborative Robots) – that can fly or swim, exploring caves and oceans and will go where other robots haven’t been able to explore. Each cobots equipped with a propeller.
The researchers predict cobots that could come together automatically, without any command from Earth to form into a rolling sphere, fly independently or even create a daisy chain while exploring a cave. On the current prototype, NASA describes it as a contraption that looks like a drone encased in an elongated hamster wheel. Additionally, it can split and form two flying drones.
This 3D-printed prototype is being tested at JPL as part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) research program. NIAC provides phased funding to advanced, visionary concepts, to take futuristic ideas and nurture them toward practicality.
The team behind Shapeshifter includes researchers from Stanford and Cornell universities. When they built the concept of a self-assembling robot made of smaller robots, they named them cobots. Robotics Technologist Ali Agha, JPL’s Principal Investigator for this Shapeshifter, said in a statement, “We have very limited information about the composition of the surface of Titan. Rocky terrain, methane lakes, cryovolcanoes – we potentially have all of these, but we don’t know for certain. So, we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain but also compact enough to launch on a rocket.”
Moving forward, Agha suggested that some future mission could carry a ‘mothercraft’ to the surface of Titan that would power the cobots and transmit additional scientific instruments to perform its own work. The cobots might even work together to shift this lander from one place to other.
Titan has seen only one probe land on its surface during the Cassini–Huygens space research mission. Huygen’s brief operations in 2005, coupled with Cassini’s long-term observations between 2004 and 2017, showed Titan is much like Earth. The mission is known for explorations such as finding jets of water erupting from Enceladus, and tracking down a few new moons for Saturn.
As part of the latest research, Shapeshifter is currently a 3D-printed conceptual machine, but it is an apparent indication of the direction that robotic exploration is taking their place, and is well-suited to exploring distant places like Saturn’s Titan.
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