Forget Rovers, NASA Plans To Send Robot Dogs To Explore Mars Caves

NASA sent a state-of-the-art rover to explore the Mars surface with its Mars 2020 mission earlier this year. Due to touch ground on the planet in January, the Perseverance rover will even collect rock samples from the planet for later retrieval by the space agency in subsequent missions to Mars. Even with all its capabilities, the Perseverance rover has its own sets of challenges.

NASA now plans to overcome these by sending robot dogs to Mars instead of rovers.

One of the challenges to be met, for instance, is that of a limited manoeuvring offered by rovers. They are limited to surfaces and if they topple, the mission is practically over, as happened in the case of Chandrayaan-2 with ISRO.

A rendering of Au-Spot robot dog on Mars (Image: NASA)

Robot dogs that now NASA is reportedly targeting to deploy in place of these rovers will not have these issues. These animal-mimicking robots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and are equipped with an array of sensors. If put to use, they can navigate their way across terrains that are impossible to cover with a rover.

This navigation will even be much faster than what is possible today. While the Curiosity rover had a speed of about 0.09 mph (0.14 km/h) on the Martian surface, Mars Dog being touted for future missions reach normal walking speeds of 3 mph (5 km/h) in testing. This is also because these robots are roughly 12 times lighter than current rovers.

Best part, if they topple, they can get right back up.

NASA¡¯s plan

As per a report by LiveScience, researchers with NASA¡¯s JPL-Caltech introduced their idea of "Mars Dogs" in a presentation on December 14 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) held online. The idea, as above, was to have unprecedented capabilities of manoeuvre on the next missions to the red planet.

For this, the researchers are working on "Au-Spot," an autonomous canine that will explore Mars. The robot is a modified version of "Spot," a similar explorer robot created by the renowned robotics firm Boston Dynamics, that went viral on social media post its launch last year.

Spot robot dog by Boston Dynamics

Au-Spot can input data from Lidar, visual, thermal and motion sensors and can use this to create 3D maps on the Martian surface. In addition, the embedded AI enables it to learn which structures it should avoid while navigating. It can identify objects of scientific interest using this AI. The Mars Dog is even able to relay information from underground exploration using a communications module.

Au-Spot is currently being tested in a range of obstacle courses that mimic Martian landscapes. Once its capabilities are considered to be at par with what is required on Mars, the robot dog might bring in a revolutionary leap in mankind¡¯s ability to explore other planets.