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Meet AstroAnt: Swarm Robots to Perform Lunar Inspections and Diagnostic Tasks

The AstroAnt Payload Program involves testing space-grade lubricants on AstroAnt, modular robotic swarms that can ride atop a lunar rover and collect data related to its health. Watch this video to learn more.

Learn more  about AstroAnt.

Topics:
Aerospace Automation Robotics

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:01 the Astro ant um that is a miniaturized robot that works in a swarm so we can have a whole bunch of these on top of our Rover and it helps to make sure that our Rover is safe and happy while it's moving along and deploying all these other instruments by taking data from the top of the Rover so it can tell us if there's a micrometeoroid impact on our Rover or if there is a hot spot the

    00:00:25 sun's been hitting something too high um and then we can control the Rover by sending it in to tell it where to go on this when it would be on the surface of the Moon or here where we're testing it to really push it to its limits we can also control it with just a a regular gaming controller later this year we will actually be sending this to the moon so

    00:00:45 this data is really important for us because this piece of Hardware is going to be on the lunar surface at the end of the year the ant we are we're testing the performance of the motion system in a Dusty environment uh this landscape is a fairly close uh lunar analog it's very dry lens is a desert uh obviously the Moon is a desert there's no

    00:01:05 precipitation there we've been able to gather all the data we're looking for we haven't seen that much dust um having that much of an effect so good and bad on the motion system we are actually seeing a little bit of wobble in this in this version um so that's something that we're going to have to correct when we go back to base we'll uh take this all the data we collected uh and produce

    00:01:26 another uh revision we've been testing the note all week it's a desert uh and it's pretty much all rock that mirrors many of the features we' expect to see on the moon it's been excellent um we've been able to gather all the data we're looking for um just wonderful