The winner of NASA's annual Big Idea Challenge is a group where most members are undergraduate students. They designed a robot that mimics the movement of an Earth creature to deal with the Moon's grainy and hilly environment.
Cobra to Explore Moon For Artemis Mission
Last year's 2022 Big Idea Challenge was about extreme terrain access for mobility platforms. Matthew Schroeter, the team's lead, who graduated from Northeastern in 2022 and currently works at Honeybee Robotics, said the regolith and sand share the same properties and both are very porous. They considered the snake's sidewinding movement and the friction of slopes and came up with their design.
The group called their robot Cobra (Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator), WIRED reported.
The students constructed a "Mini Cobra" first, which measured just under 2 feet in length and weighed about 5 pounds. It is composed of eleven carbon fiber and nylon units that are interconnected. Each is equipped with a battery-powered actuator - essentially a motor - that can execute commands from a Raspberry Pi located in the snake's head. Because it is modular, it can be manipulated into a sidewinding configuration for traversing flat, sandy terrains, such as the bottom of a crater, and a hexagonal wheel for rolling down steep slopes.
Northeastern University has provided the following image.
Cobra's tail is intended to house a mini neutron spectrometer, which can measure changes in the energy of neutrons on the Moon's surface and thus identify hydrogen and, by extension, water deep within Shackleton Crater. The team also designed the robot to be equipped with radar sensors and an inertial measurement unit, allowing ground-based operators to monitor Cobra's motion, speed, and location as it rolls and winds around.
To test these functions, the team piloted the Mini Cobra through loading docks and parking lots surrounding the Northeastern University campus in downtown Boston. The latching mechanism that connects Cobra's head and tail when it enters tumbling mode poses a challenge. It would occasionally latch too firmly, creating the possibility of damaged wires or a severed connection. Bhora worked until the last minute, troubleshooting the problem in the robot's software before settling on a two-step solution that prevented the robot from swaying and produced a secure latch.
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More About NASA's Big Idea Challenge Competition
The winning team faced six other groups, which also presented legged robots, wheeled robots and a robot that lowered itself down steep terrain on a cable. A group from MIT designed a Lego-like robot that can be reconfigured into several shapes.
However, Cobra outshined the others when it latched itself seamlessly into a circle and propelled itself down a steep hill, with the team cheering it on from behind.
It wound its way through some sagebrush, but the operators maneuvered it out of the thorny brush and sent it on its way.
In the California desert, students controlled the robot from a distance of only a few steps. However, it takes approximately three seconds for signals to travel from the Earth's surface to the Moon and back, necessitating autonomous decision-making capabilities for lunar systems.
The team demonstrated all of Cobra's modes of locomotion successfully and won the Artemis Award, the competition's highest honor.
Most members of the winning team are undergraduates and are still active in space exploration club. Alireza Ramezani, the team's faculty advisor and a professor of engineering at Northeastern, said a team of doctoral candidates is currently looking into the autonomy requirements for commanding the Cobra system.
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