Gizmodo - Michael Jordan? Muhammad Ali? Joe Montana? Sit down. The world’s most amazing athlete works for NASA. Meet the gigantic, six-legged, tool-wielding robot that can hop around an asteroid. Tiger Woods ain’t got nothin’.
The robot you see in the video is a half-scale model of a vehicle that NASA wants to send on a human mission to the moon. Half. This thing is thirteen feet tall. It’s naked in the video, but when it eventually launches it’ll have a payload on its back. It’ll probably house a ton of tools and gear, and even temporary space for a crew of one or two. It’s the lunar rover’s mutant, roboinsectoid big brother, and it’s incredible.
Athlete’s wheels are designed for benign terrain, which means normal, solid, not-too-rocky moon dirt. Ordinarily, a vehicle this size and weight (it weighs more 5,000 pounds and can carry a payload of over 32,000 pounds… well, earth-pounds) would need big fat wheels to prevent it from sinking in soft sand. Ditto for driving over larger obstacles. But larger wheels need larger motors, which require more weight, more power, and other headaches. The engineers who designed Athlete sidestepped this problem. Literally. By having the wheels on articulated limbs, it can just step over large rocks, or push itself out of soft sand. This means it can have smaller wheels and motors, which makes it far more dextrous. The limbs that drive the robot are the limbs that do detailed work, like drilling and taking samples. The motors that turn the wheels are the motors that actuate the tools. Genius. Or, perhaps more to the point: rocket science.
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