2024-01-20 05:45:32
Future long-duration, deep space exploration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond will require a way to build large-scale infrastructure, such as solar energy collection stations, communications towers, and crew habitats. To maintain a long-term presence in deep space, the ability to build and maintain these systems in situ, rather than shipping bulky pre-assembled equipment from Earth, is needed.
At NASA, the ARMADAS (Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly Systems) team is developing a hardware and software system to meet that need.
This system uses different types of worm-like robots that can assemble, repair, and reconfigure structural materials for a wide range of large-scale hardware systems outside of Earth. Robots can do their work in orbit, on the lunar surface, or on the surface of other worlds, even before human astronauts arrive.
Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center in the United States recently conducted a laboratory demonstration of the ARMADAS technology and analyzed the system’s performance. During testing, three robots worked together autonomously to build a meter-scale shelter structure (about the size of a shed) using hundreds of building blocks.
“The ground assembly experiment demonstrated crucial parts of the system: the scalability and reliability of the robots, and the performance of the structures they build. This type of testing is key to maturing the technology for use in space applications,” stated Christine Gregg, ARMADAS chief engineer at the Ames Center.
One of the robots in the experiment at a time during construction work. (Photo: NASA / Dominic Hart)
The high strength, notable rigidity and low mass of the structural product is comparable to the qualities possessed by current higher-performance structures, such as long bridges or airplane wings.
The performances demonstrated in the latest experiments represent a giant step in the field of robotically reconfigurable structures for outside the Earth. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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