All the rovers that have reached and crossed the Martian surface to date (from the old Pathfinder to the latest Zhurong) had one point in common: the presence of wheels.
SpaceBok no. He has more important projects.
SpaceBok is the quadruped robot built by a team of scientists fromETH in Zurich in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Its name derives from that of the springbok antelope. Do you know him? It is the symbol of the South African national rugby team, so to speak.
What does SpaceBok do?
It doesn't sharpen knives or repair gas stoves, it must be said. It was originally designed to hop and walk on the lunar surface. Just like the astronauts did during the Apollo landings!
Now, to adapt the concept to Mars, where the terrain is more treacherous and gravity is stronger, the SpaceBok team has altered the robot's gait to make it more stable.
Their work is detailed in a study on the arXiv prepress server.
How do you walk on Mars?
The team tested several paces. He alternated small hoof-like feet to flat and round feet with studs for added stability.
Since much of Mars research revolves around craters (Mars Perseverance landed on Jezero Crater, which may have once been a habitable river valley) the team behind SpaceBok trained the robot on a large “tilted litter” full of rocks to simulate Mars.
And it made a big splash, friends. Yes, robots on wheels are more stable. I am not surprised that they were the first choice for space exploration. The robots with legs, however, will be able to go where no rover would go.
The first car that flew into the skies of another planet, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, has great potential for surveying, but a quadrupedal robot would, in theory, allow detailed exploration of rocky terrain and even Martian cave systems.
The research that led to SpaceBok
In its paper, the SpaceBok team demonstrated that the machine can efficiently climb a simulated Martian tilt without falling, which would be disastrous for a billion-dollar mission.
The researchers wrote that their findings present new avenues for “safe and efficient global path planning strategies for accessing steep topography on Mars.”
And they are right
Tests showed that both the smaller and round snowshoe-like feet allowed the SpaceBok to maintain stable footing on an incline of up to 25 degrees.
With other innovations in robotics coming in full force (such as proprioceptive feedback for descending stairs and drops) we will undoubtedly see more strings to the SpaceBok's bow in the coming years.
