{"id":165,"date":"2013-03-21T11:34:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T18:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/?p=165"},"modified":"2014-11-04T11:48:17","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T19:48:17","slug":"presentation-on-tensegrity-robots-for-planetary-exploration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/2013\/03\/presentation-on-tensegrity-robots-for-planetary-exploration","title":{"rendered":"Presentation on Tensegrity Robots for Planetary Exploration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week Adrian and I presented our work on “Super Ball Bot<\/a>” a tensegrity robot for planetary landing and exploration, at the NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts)<\/a> Program’s Spring Symposium<\/a>. It was really fun to share all the progress we have made in the mission concept development and engineering analysis. The best aspect of this is that our work is supporting our initial intuition that this concept is workable and not as crazy as it initially sounded. Luckily for us, the NIAC program is designed to try out these high risk, but high pay-off, concepts for new technologies for space exploration. Thus, when the BBC interviewed us<\/a>, we took it as a good sign that they called us “NASA’s crazy robot lab.<\/strong>” Balancing that view, Tech Buzzer<\/a> called us “Not actually crazy. But certainly innovative and ambitious.<\/strong>” And while the Tech Buzzer article has many factual errors, they are right about the innovation and ambition — we are developing an idea that has never been tried before, and if it works (which we think it will — with a lot more hard work), then it could change the future of robotics and space exploration. <\/p>\n

Watch the video below to find out more, and see my earlier post<\/a> where I first described the project when we started (much has evolved since then!).<\/p>\n