Now that Northeastern’s team has proven COBRA can make some moves, it will focus on expanding the robot’s suite of sensors to help it detect the moon’s frozen water. Photos by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University When they saw the robot tumble down a rocky hill for the first time during NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge, even they were impressed by how it performed. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University The team of Northeastern engineers has been working on COBRA for over nine months. “It’s pretty lightweight, and when you’re considering that it’s around $1 million per kilogram to launch, then anything that you can cut down is pretty cost effective,” Smithwick says. Constructed using 3D printing, the robot weighs about 20 pounds, or 9 kilograms, compared to other robots in the competition that were pushing 200 pounds. “In this case we chose sidewinding because that is primarily found in snakes that travel over a really porous surface, like sand, and that’s kind of what the … lunar surface is like.”įor NASA and private space exploration companies, COBRA’s lightweight design is also key. “There are craters, there are big rocks that you might not be able to get over, so we wanted to combine it with a different type of mobility,” team lead Nolan Smithwick says. That’s where the snakelike design came in. But rolling doesn’t help when it comes to navigating countless lunar obstacles. The team looked at hopping, walking and crawling robots before settling on something that can harness even partial gravity to roll down lunar craters, making it more energy efficient in the process. Photos by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern Universityīut the robot’s transformational, bio-inspired design was not always the plan. The robot can sidewind, corkscrew roll and tumble, depending on the needs of its mission and environmental conditions. Ramezani says COBRA has “locomotive plasticity,” the ability to use different forms of mobility to traverse its environment. For long, steep hills, like lunar craters, the robot can connect its head and tail, transforming into a loop that can pick up serious momentum rolling downhill. In its snakelike form, COBRA can sidewind like a snake across sand or assume a spiral shape that allows it to roll down hills in a more stable way. The robot can be used as a probe, as an autonomous vehicle that can tumble down the craters, go to the lowland area and turn into a snake robot to do some sidewinding and evaluate ice water content in these craters.” “You actually have to go there and do proximity evaluation. “You can’t really use a lunar orbiter from a distance to inspect the ice water content,” Ramezani says. By identifying locations with frozen water deposits, COBRA could pave the way for lunar colonization. Northeastern robotics team wins $1M in third-place finish at global competition read moreĬOBRA’s ability to move across flat ground using serpentine sidewinding and transform into a tumbling loop make it perfect for exploring hard-to-navigate lunar craters that scientists suspect hold frozen water. More than that, they were excited by the interest COBRA had received from NASA and industry partners who are eager to launch Northeastern’s robot to the moon. BIG Idea tasks teams of students with developing alternative modes of navigating extreme terrain, providing funding and support along the way.Īfter nine months of work on their serpentine spacefarer, even the team was impressed with how the robot had performed. “And after our demos, after my students’ presentations, they were all convinced that this is the way to go.”įacing off against the likes of MIT and California Institute of Technology, Northeastern’s COBRA–Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator–earned top honors at this year’s BIG Idea Challenge: the Artemis Award. “One of the judges told me in person he was actually very skeptical of us being able to show any meaningful form of mobility and capability,” says Alireza Ramezani, Northeastern assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and faculty adviser on the project. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University Alireza Ramezani, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, says Northeastern’s COBRA robot could be the first snake robot sent to explore the moon. When Northeastern’s team of student roboticists showed up in Pasadena, California, in November to compete in NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing Idea Challenge, the judges took one look at their robot and had some questions.Īfter seeing the team’s snakelike robot shapeshift into a hexagonal loop and tumble down a 50-meter hill without sustaining damage, they had only praise.
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