NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have awarded Ethan Schaler a Phase II funding grant for a project that aims to build a swarm of small swimming robots that could be sent to places that humans and massive robots cannot reach, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Packed inside a narrow ice-melting probe that would tunnel through the frozen crust, the tiny robots would be released underwater, swimming far from their mothercraft to look for signs of alien life.
“My idea is, where can we take miniaturised robotics and apply them in interesting new ways for exploring our solar system?” said Schaler, a robotics mechanical engineer at JPL and the leader of the project.
“With a swarm of small swimming robots, we are able to explore a much larger volume of ocean water and improve our measurements by having multiple robots collecting data in the same area.”
Schaler's Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) concept...