‘Snakes’ on the moon? These helpers could soon join our lunar mission.
A six-legged spider-like robot was recently developed by of a group of ASU engineering students for a NASA competition that challenged participants to come with applications and designs for robotics technology that could potentially help the national space agency explore the moon’s roughest terrain. The ASU team responded with a four foot tall robot named CHARLOTTE, an acronym for Crater Hydrogen And Regolith Laboratory for Observation on Technical Terrain Environments, which uses a lidar system to scan surrounding terrain. CHARLOTTE won the competition’s best systems engineering award.