Science/Tech

NASA Starts Working On ‘Super Bot’ Rover For Saturn’s Titan

By Kamal Nayan | Update Date: Dec 30, 2013 10:04 AM EST

NASA is now headed to Titan. The agency is reportedly working on a new rover that in the near future would rove across the vast expanse of Saturn’s moon Titan.

The in-development rover is internally being referred as a “Super Ball Bot.”

The rover will be capable of changing its shape according to circumstances and could survive a more than 60 mile (100 km) drop onto the planet’s surface. Apart from this, rover will also have the ability to survive falls off of the cliffs and into the gullies.

“Ideally, teams of dozens or even hundreds of small, collapsible robots, weighing only a few kilograms a piece, will be conveniently packed during launch and would reliably separate and unpack at their destination,” read a report from NASA.

The Super Ball Bot possess unique design and the team behind it had to adopt a different approach for working on it.

“Our primary approach has been to evolve the controls,” said NASA researcher Adrian K. Agogino, according to Aviation Record.

“The best we can hope for is to give it lots of options for what it may do, so we can select hundreds if not thousands of different options. Some are good, some are bad. At the beginning, most are bad. Like evolution, you replicate the good ones and make small changes. Eventually, the good ones get better and better, and out of the thousands of bad controls, you get a set of good ones.”

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