Move over, Michael Bay: NASA is designing its own shape-shifting robots to investigate Saturn’s moons.
The agency’s fleet of mini androids can roll, fly, float, and swim—then morph into a single machine capable of exploring treacherous, distant worlds.
(I’d watch an entire film series based on that.)
A prototype of the transformational vehicle, dubbed Shapeshifter, looks like a drone got caught in an elongated hamster wheel. But looks can be deceiving.
In a dusty robotics yard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the team is testing their 3D-printed contraption: It rolls across the sand before stopping and splitting in half. Once separated, the two sections rise, their small propellers turning them into flying drones.
An illustration of an early concept of Shapeshifter imagines the robots on Saturn’s moon Titan (via NASA/JPL-Caltech)
And this is only the beginning, according to NASA, which tipped a series of up to 12 robots that could transform into a swimming probe or cave searcher.
JPL Principal Investigator Ali Agha envisions Shapeshifter one day going as far as Saturn’s moon Titan—the only other world in our Solar System known to feature liquid in the form of methane lakes, rivers, and seas.
“We have very limited information about the composition of the surface,” he said in a statement. “So we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain, but also compact enough to launch on a rocket.”
Enter Shapeshifter.
An illustration of the small robots that form Shapeshifter (via NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Agha and his co-creators—including researchers from Stanford and Cornell universities—came up with the concept of a self-assembling robot made of smaller cyborgs.
The so-called “cobots” each house a small propeller, and are able to move independent of one another but also work together to form fly along cliff sides, go spelunking, and transform into an autonomous sphere.
Ideally, Shapeshifter will make its way to Titan, where the European Space Agency’s Huygens Probe (the “mothercraft,” as Agha calls it) would serve as an energy source for the cobots, which could easily lift and transport the lander.
“It is often the case that some of the hardest places to get to are the most scientifically interesting because maybe they’re the youngest, or they’re in an area that was not well characterized from orbit,” lead JPL scientist Jason Hofgartner explained. “Shapeshifter’s remarkable versatility enables access to all of these scientifically compelling places.”
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