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These webcam-GPS equipped robots act like ants if they find anything interesting.
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An army of autonomous self-driving robots is being developed by NASA and
these robots are equipped with webcams and GPS. The robots are being
created in order to explore other planets in future. The robots are
codenamed as “Swarmies”.
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Other Nasa robots are much bigger than these swarmies, if we
remember the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity. Each swarmie is packed with
a webcam, a Wi-Fi antenna and GPS (Global Positioning System) for exact
navigation. These swarmies function just like an ant colony. If an ant
finds out a food source then the rest of the colony gets notified
through a special signal. Then the ants together jump into taking that
food to their nest.
NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida has
developed a software which controls these swarmies. They can move out to
different directions and start searching for a specific pre-planned
material, suppose ice-water on Mars. If any of the rover finds something
similar, then it uses its radio communication power and calls other
robots to help in collecting more samples. Kurt Leucht, one of the
engineers who are associated with the project, said, "For a while people
were interested in putting as much smarts and capability as they could
on their one robot.”
Leucht said further, "Now people are
realising you can have much smaller, much simpler robots that can work
together and achieve a task. One of them can roll over and die and it's
not the end of the mission because the others can still accomplish the
task.” The testing phase for these swarmies is just in its primary stage
and presently the robots have been programmed just to look for barcoded
slips of paper.
In next few months the tests will also include
RASSOR which is a mining robot, designed to dig into alien surfaces and
look for valuable materials. These tests will determine how much this
software can control the robots when they are functional.
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