At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., researchers have developed an autonomous crew of robots that can work in synch with each other to grasp, lift, and move heavy loads across rough, varied terrain. NASA says the robots would be perfect for setting up a base camp on the red planet ahead of human settlement. The bots look like traditional Mars rovers, but they are equipped with a claw-like grip hand that opens and closes to pick up and carry a payload. Each is programmed with a set of behaviors that tells it how to approach loads, said Paul Schenker, supervisor of the Mechanical and Robotics Technologies Group and principal investigator of the project at JPL.
