Robots on the Moon

A fleet of land and airborne robots has been developed to mine, excavate and even build on the Moon.
Earth's satellite is rich in resources including basalt, iron, quartz and silicon that could help set up a human colony.
Lead author Philip Arm, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said: "Using multiple robots has two advantages.
"The individual robots can take on specialised tasks and perform them simultaneously. Moreover, thanks to its redundancy, a robot team is able to compensate for a teammate’s failure."
Important measuring equipment would be installed on several machines. Mr Arm said: "Getting the benefits of both is a matter of finding the right balance."
The researchers solved this problem by equipping two of the robots as specialists. One was programmed to be particularly good at mapping the terrain and classifying the geology.
It used a laser scanner and several cameras – some of them capable of spectral analysis – to gather initial clues about the mineral composition of the rock.
The other was taught to precisely identify rocks using a scanning device and a microscopy camera.
A third was a generalist - able to both map the terrain and identify rocks. It had a broader range of tasks.
But its equipment meant that it could perform these tasks with less precision. SWSCrobot - by Mark Waghorn