KLH@NIC.DDN.MIL (Ken Harrenstien) (12/19/89)
I'm a little surprised that during the discussion of Mars rovers, etc, nobody has debated the notion of microrovers or microspacecraft. There were some interesting articles about this in the October 1989 issue of Aerospace America (featuring "Genghis Microrover" on the cover). Briefly, the basic concept is to stamp out thousands (even millions) of cheap tiny probes or "gnat robots" which could then be used with great abandon, relying on their smaller scale and greater numbers to bypass the currently prohibitive requirements for reliability or sophistication. The articles list lots of neat little ideas and applications for these things. The authors were Ross M. Jones and James D. Burke of JPL (microspacecraft) plus Rodney A. Brooks and Anita M. Flynn of the MIT A.I. Lab (microrovers). What makes this a little more interesting than the usual theoretical brainstorming is the illustrations of actual MIT mobile robot testbeds, the smallest weighing 50g. It would be nice if someone familiar with these areas of research could post additional details... --Ken -------
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/20/89)
In article <12551336688.32.KLH@NIC.DDN.MIL> KLH@NIC.DDN.MIL (Ken Harrenstien) writes: >... It would >be nice if someone familiar with these areas of research could post >additional details... Check out the October issue -- I think it was October -- of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (any good technical library should have this). It's a special issue on small spacecraft and the like, with technical papers on a variety of schemes (including several from JPL and one from the MIT microrover people). The main problem with microrovers is that they are a research topic, not a well-understood technology. That will change, possibly soon enough to be of immediate relevance. (At the glacial pace of US mission planning, change "possibly" to "probably"... :-( ) -- 1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972: human | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu