Remember back when NASA roboticist Brett Kennedy said that BB-8 had “design flaws” and wouldn’t be well-suited for desert terrain? Back then, nobody had seen The Force Awakens yet, so we didn’t know that BB-8 had a few tricks for getting out of a ditch, such as prehensile metal arm thingies (I don’t know what those are called, but if you’ve seen the movie you know what I’m talking about). Anyway, Andre Mazzoleni, who is an aerospace engineer and also a Star Wars fan, develops spherical rovers for Mars exploration and recently explained to PopSci that they’re quite similar in design to BB-8.
All of the Mars rovers in operation right now have wheels, which does mean there’s some concern about how they’ll get out of ditches — as Kennedy pointed out with regard to BB-8 months ago. In order to solve that problem, Mazzoleni and doctoral student Lionel Edwin developed this rover called a TRREx. It can become a sphere for rolling purposes, or uncurl a leg to use as an appendage when applicable:
Sorta like BB-8 crossed with a Transformer, right?
The TRREx isn’t exactly like BB-8, of course, since it uses its legs much more often — but it can use its rolling functionality on downhill inclines to save fuel, which sounds like a pretty clever design. It’s also neat to hear that BB-8 isn’t as impractical as initially thought.
Hooray for droids!
(via PopSci)
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