Italians To Conquer Moon With Dancing Hexapods
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 14 of May , 2009 at 4:06 am
This is a concept lunar rover from Team Italia, contenders for the Google Lunar X Prize, which will award $20 million to the first team to land a robot on the moon, go 500 meters, and send back high def video by 2012. Rather than develop one big expensive and complex robot, Team Italia is working on “spiders or crabs that could deploy as a swarm of mobile cameras and sensors on both legs and wheels.” So far, they’ve been working with what seems to be a modified off-the-shelf hexapod, and although I have no idea how this is practical for lunar exploration, they’ve turned it into a fairly good dancer:
At the end of the video, it kinda looked as though they’ve modified their hexapod with ankle wheels of sorts, that lets it transform into a hexapodal car. Imagine what kind of dance moves you could do with that… How ’bout some kind of six-legged moonwalk?
[ Team Italia ] VIA [ Space.com ]
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Category: Competitive, Research, Space
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