Meet the team that wants to put packs of robo-canines on the lunar surface to find water.
It’s the year 2035. You wake up and press a button that opens up the blinds for your bedroom window revealing a spectacular view of Earth. It’s another “morning” on the moon as you start your day in one of the human colonies on the lunar surface. As you get out of bed, though, you hear it: the familiar whirring sounds of actuators and the tip tap of feet as your robot dog makes its way towards you. You pet the pooch before you two get started on another day of exploring the moon.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and the Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany both entered robot dog designs in the, a competition for European and Canadian engineering teams to develop moon rovers capable of scouting and prospecting valuable resources such as ice in harsh and inhospitable areas of the moon like the south lunar pole.
“Walking machines provide advantages over wheel-based systems when it comes to rocky terrain, steep slopes, or a combination of both,” Hendrik Kolvenbach, an engineer at the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich and scientific director of the GLIMPSE project, told The Daily Beast in an email.