As demonstrated by the bumpy landing of ESA’s Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, exploring comets, asteroids, and small moons can be difficult due to their low gravity. Not only can landing on one be like trying to alight on a trampoline, but roving around their surfaces is next to impossible because the negligible gravity offers practically no traction. To overcome this, a team of engineers is developing Hedgehog, a completely symmetrical robot rover for low-gravity exploration that moves by hopping.
A joint project by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Stanford University, and MIT, the Hedgehog robot gets around these limitations with an unusual form of locomotion that allows it to hop, tumble, skip, and even launch itself with artificial “tornadoes.” Essentially a cube with horns or spikes on each corner, it has no right way up and every face is identical, so it doesn’t matter how it lands. In addition, the cube shape makes it easy to pack economically in a spacecraft.
via Gizmag
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Stanford
