Press release
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august 21, 2019 - Porsche
Man on the moon
The moon has a branch office in Bremen. The slope of the artificial crater is nine meters wide; five-and-a-half meters of elevation must be scaled from the foot of the depression to its top. Those wishing to climb it must overcome inclines of 25 to 40 degrees. People are generally spectators here, though, for this moonscape was designed as a training ground for astronauts of steel: In the space exploration hall at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), robots practice independent exploratory missions on the satellite of Earth. The choice of terrain is no accident: Craters and their surroundings are among the most interesting places on moons and planets because their slopes contain sediment layers from different eras, as well as traces of material from the solar system. Their walls also provide information about the origins of moons and planets.
The creator of the climbing robot is Professor Frank Kirchner, who heads the Robotics Innovation Center at DFKI on the outskirts of Bremen and works on mechanical astronauts with his team. His creatures are often biologically inspired, such as the four-legged walking robot Charlie, which looks like a monkey, or Mantis, a contraption with six extremities that looks like its namesake from the animal kingdom. At present, Coyote III, a gray-and-orange rover with star-shaped wheels and a flattish silhouette is navigating the artificial moonscape.
Intelligent and autonomous robots are indispensable for space exploration because they require no food and no oxygen. And once the mission is done, they don’t need a return journey to Earth. They do, however, have to be able to hold their own, to some extent, on strange moons and planets. The artificial crater in Bremen provides an opportunity to see how well they do at it. The crater was built by a company that ordinarily builds indoor climbing walls. “The template was photographs taken by Apollo astronauts of a crater at the Moon’s south pole,” explains Kirchner, one of the world’s foremost experts for autonomous space and underwater robots.
Autonomous submarine for the moon of JupiterOuter space and the underwater world have more in common than one might assume at first glance. One of the most interesting places in the solar system, after all, is Jupiter’s moon Europa, under whose ice sheet a vast ocean of liquid water has been postulated—a place, in other words, in which life could have developed.
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