Dangerous, frontline firefighting jobs may get a bit safer thanks to new heat-sensing sensors designed by NASA. The sensors are made from commonly available household materials, and attach to the bulldozers firefighters use to clear vegetation and brush in a fire’s immediate path, triggering an alarm when temperatures reach extremely dangerous levels.
Knowing when a fire is hot might sound obvious, but many new so-called fire dozers are being outfitted with enclosures to protect their operators from the flames. That’s a welcome change, but it also reduces the operator’s ability to gauge the surrounding heat. These new sensors help solve that problem, protecting the driver and helping prevent the dozers from sustaining too much damage.
The sensor setup is simple by design. It consists of a standard thermocouple similar to those found in a home oven, which is then wired to an LED light in the dozer’s cabin. If the light starts blinking, it’s time to get out of Dodge.
The entire system is powered by something that’s probably laying around your house: AA batteries. Using a simple power source like this is part of an attempt to make every aspect of the design affordable and accessible. University of Alabama, Huntsville research scientist Ryan Wade emphasized that point in a NASA blog post. He explained that during a recent trial installing the sensor in a fire dozer, his team realized that they were missing a part. Rather than waiting to hear back from NASA and having a custom piece shipped to them, they simply walked down the street to a hardware store and solved the problem.
NASA Wildland Fires Program science integration manager Jennifer Fowler holds an LED light on the dashboard of a fire dozer belonging to the Alabama Forestry Commission (AFC). The LED light is connected to a thermal sensor mounted in the window of the dozer, which turns the light on when the radiant heat from a nearby fire reaches a dangerous threshold. FireSense scientists have been working with the AFC to develop and install these thermal sensors onto these dozers, which they showcased during a stakeholder event on April 23-24, 2026 at the Solon Dixon Forestry Education Center in Andalusia, Alabama. Image: NASA/Milan Loiacono.
“NASA’s expertise in this case comes not in the novelty of the instrument itself, but in figuring out how to solve the problem quickly and integrate that technology into their existing system,” Wade said.
That flexibility is what makes the approach so valuable for firefighters. Alabama Forestry Commission fire analyst Ethan Barrett says the devices so far work “exactly as intended.” In Alabama, at least, officials are planning to outfit their entire dozer fleet with the sensors. The sensor system was developed by NASA’s FireSense project, whose interest in it was twofold. The sensors will more immediately help firefighters on the ground as fire season approaches, but the data they collect will also prove invaluable for future research. By placing sensors in the dozers, NASA will gather reams of data about fire strength and intensity straight from the front lines.
It seems like every week there’s another example of a new robot modeled after a real creature in the animal kingdom. From dogs and bats, to roaches and desert lizards, the natural world is a constant source of inspiration for engineers. But while most robotics researchers use animals as a base for their machine’s movement, an ambitious team of Duke University engineers set out to make something entirely new: a robot whose form factor and movement aren’t derived from biology, but from the universe’s underlying physics.
Say hello to Argus, a 20-legged, blob-looking robot capable of seeing in all directions at the same time and able to move almost instantly in any direction. The amorphous-looking sphere has no top or bottom, no left or right, and will keep trekking through sand, dirt, and gravel even when some of its legs are destroyed. It can also use its many legs to shimmy up narrow walls, a move similar to a wall jump in “Super Mario.”
The engineers behind Argus say their intriguing, if not slightly terrifying, creation isn’t just another incremental step forward in robotics. It’s the first member of a totally new category of “dynamically symmetric machines.” The findings were published this week in the journal Science Robotics.
“Watching Argus move is unlike watching any other robot we’ve worked with,” study co-author and Duke PhD student Jiaxun Liu said in a statement . “The first time we saw it navigate among trees and rough terrain, even under heavy collisions, we knew this was something different.”
Biological tradeoffs
Though somewhat human-looking, upright bipedal robots from companies like Figure and Tesla are all the rage these days, engineers have long looked to other animals to inspire their machines, because animals are simply better than Homo sapiens at certain tasks. Dogs and other quadrupeds are more agile, bats can fly, and bugs can scurry into hard-to-reach places.
However, at least in terms of movement, each of the pluses of these specific animals has also come with some minuses. Dogs and other quadrupeds are remarkably fast and nimble when moving forwards, but ask them to replicate that movement when moving backwards and you’re in for a problem.
With those inherent biological tradeoffs in mind, the team at Duke’s General Robotics Lab set out to make something completely different. Taking inspiration from underlying physics, they wanted to see if they could make a robot based around “dynamic symmetry,” which they define as the ability to generate forces and acceleration with uniform magnitude in all directions.
In other words, such a robot would take the idea of left or right and up and down and throw them out the window. Instead, it would be capable of moving in any direction, at any time, without any privilege given to one particular direction. The goal was essentially to build possibly the world’s first “omnidirectional” robot.
Argus keeps on coming—even when you break its legs
The design team eventually settled on a spherical core, or base, with a bunch of legs sticking out of it. They made multiple versions in a simulation, one with as few as eight legs and another with as many as 40. Eventually they settled on an even 20 legs for the physical build. Each of those legs is tipped with a camera that serves as one of Argus’ many eyes. Fitting, then, that it’s named after a many-eyed giant in Greek mythology. The researchers describe Argus as visually similar to a sea urchin, but even that’s selling it short. It doesn’t really look like anything in nature, which makes its uncanny movement in real-world testing all the more unsettling.
In testing, Argus could move in any direction just as quickly and comfortably as any other. The upside of that is that the blob is actually quite adaptable to different terrain despite its unusual appearance. It can easily traverse forest, wet surfaces, and sand, and could climb over certain obstacles. Argus’ ability to rapidly redistribute its weight also meant that it excelled at recovering when researchers tried to shove it off course. While Argus isn’t the first robot to right itself after getting pummeled by a researcher, what makes it unique is that it can redistribute its weight even if some of its legs get damaged or fail altogether.
In other words, you can chop off Argus’ legs and it will just keep coming.
Argus joins a family of DARPA-backed robots
The Duke researchers frame their interest in building this new category of machine as primarily motivated by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in mechanical science. Still, it’s hard not to ignore the researchers’ most notable funder: the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Known for incubating some of the military’s most notorious research and development projects, DARPA is responsible for everything from Boston Dynamics’ beef Atlas humanoid to a massive, experimental manta ray inspired uncrewed underwater vehicle.
So, while it’s still not clear what exactly Argus will ever be used for, paper coauthor and postdoctoral researcher at Duke’s General Robotics Lab Boxi Xia says the experimentation and exploration was success in itself.
“Argus is an existence proof,” Xia said in a statement. “It shows that designing for dynamic symmetry isn’t just a theoretical curiosity. It produces a robot you can deploy in the wild, on uneven ground and in clutter, even in low-gravity settings. It changes what’s possible.”
A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have developed a humidity-based image encoder that looks straight out of James Bond’s Q-Lab. The postage stamp-sized chip can store a hidden message that is only revealed when exterior humidity levels surpass 60 percent. The image can then be concealed again by bringing humidity back down. In practice, that means someone handed an object with the chip on it could simply breathe on it to unveil its secret message.
While it’s a potentially nifty tool for an undercover spy, the researchers say the encoder could also be used to reveal a security code on a credit card, or even serve as a visual indicator of climate changes in a particular area. In all of these cases, humidity essentially acts as a key. The findings were recently published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.
“You can imagine using this as a built-in security feature with the environment acting like a key that unlocks different pieces of information,” study co-author and UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering postdoctoral researcher Asad Nauman said in a statement.
In a video demonstration, a clear blue image of a UCSD trident logo appears and then quickly begins to fade as the area around it brightens. After only a few seconds in, the UCSD library logo emerges. The image then fades back to the man with the trident before switching back once more to the library logo.
Hiding a message in plain sight
The chip consists of two separate hydrogel layers. The bottom layer, made of a phase-changing material called antimony trisulfide, essentially acts as a canvas onto which lasers can etch messages. These can be text or, as in the example above, full images. The top layer is made of a softer hydrogel material called azido-grafted carboxymethyl cellulose. This layer swells in humid conditions and shrinks in dry ones, which is why the hidden message becomes visible.
The transformation of the UCSD Triton logo to the UCSD library logo. Left to right: The UCSD Triton logo is visible at a 40% humidity level; the UCSD library logo begins to appear and overlap the Triton logo at a 60 percent humidity level; the UCSD library logo is solely visible at an 85% humidity level; and both images are overlapped at a 95 percent humidity level. Image: NDAO Lab
The first, low-humidity image or message is visible when humidity levels are at or below 40 percent. As humidity levels approach 60 percent, the hidden message starts taking shape. It is then fully visible at 80 percent humidity. The image reveal is also accompanied by a color shift due to small gaps between the two hydrogel layers. When the top layer swells and expands, the increased space between the layers alters the way light reflects off them, resulting in a shift from blue to red.
Of course, for any of this to work, a spy or other user would need to operate in an area with a predictable climate. Blowing on a message in a tropical environment where the air is already thick with moisture probably won’t do the trick. Still, in a pinch, it might beat having to write out long, intricate messages on finicky invisible ink.
A 31-year-old New York native named Kelsey Pfendler is one week into her audacious quest to become the youngest woman to row unassisted from California to Hawaii. To complete her over 2,400-mile journey, she will need to face stormy seas and traverse waters teeming with all types of ocean life. If she succeeds, Pfendler will become the first American woman ever to do so.
A couple hours of napping and some food will make you feel like a new woman! Waves and wind are still big, but luckily they are becoming more favorable, allowing Kelsey’s boat to catch and ride the waves. Kelsey is rowing to raise funds for The Whale Foundation an organization whose mission is to support, restore, and celebrate the health and well-being of the Grand Canyon river guiding community. Links to learn more and donate are in our bio. @Concept2 @Recpak @insta360 official
Pfendler set off from Monterey, California on May 21 and has been posting daily updates on her TikTok. A separate live tracker also plots her position on a digital map. As of May 28, the tracker shows her off the Southern California coast, moving at 1.6 knots. The multi-month voyage is a major test of physical strength and mental fortitude, and it’s already proven grueling. In just her first week, Pfendler battled strong headwinds as she pushed away from the California coast, leaving her hands covered in blisters.
Absolutely flying today! Waves are around 14ft and wind maxed about 22mph earlier, which gave her a good boost of speed. 229 miles so far, about 2,000 to go. @Concept2 @Recpak
And it has only gotten tougher. Pfendler’s route took her directly into the path of a weather front, bringing bone-chilling temperatures and punishing waves. Worse, while taking cover from the waves, she lost the cap to her heavy-duty freshwater bag. Though she has the ability to make more freshwater with a desalination device, it runs on solar power and the storm left the skies too dark and overcast for the device to work. As a result, Pfendler has had to tap into her emergency supply of 25 small water bottles, a scarcity that has also prevented her from using water to rehydrate her freeze-dried camp food.
“It’s tortillas and peanut butter until I get some sun,” Pfendler said.
But the trip has had its lighter moments as well. Pfendler posted an update sharing her excitement when she crossed the continental shelf. At about 50 to 60 miles off the California coast, crossing the continental shelf is something few humans get to experience so intimately. She also recounted a moment where she spotted either a sea lion or a dolphin hunting fish nearby, sending them leaping out of the water all around her boat.
“It was really cool, it was in the dark and it was kinda special for me,” Pfendler said,
This quest isn’t Pfendler’s first rodeo. She completed a similar rowing trip from California to Hawaii in 2024 with three companions, serving as the skipper. That trip took 40 days, 22 hours, and 14 minutes. Still, rowing in total isolation—even for an experienced oarswoman—adds another layer of challenge. If Pfendler completes the trip, she will be just the third woman ever to do so. The record, set by British rower Lia Ditton in 2020, currently stands at 86 days, 10 hours, and 56 seconds.
Popular YouTuber and aircraft enthusiast Ramy RC built and flew what he’s calling the world’s largest remote-controlled (RC) version of a Boeing 777-9X jet. It’s not just big for an RC toy, it’s big, period.
With a wingspan of 33 feet and weighing 630 pounds, it’s roughly the same size as a human-piloted Cessna 150. The RC Boeing 777-9X may look identical to the real aircraft on the outside, but the plane is made mostly out of CNC-milled foam and carbon fiber. It has five actuators controlling the flaps, working landing gear, and is fully electric. In testing, the behemoth was able to taxi around a tarmac, lift off, and land several times.
Ramy has made a bit of a name for himself in the over-the-top RC plane-building world. He started off building models on his kitchen floor with limited time and resources, and videos of those early builds took off online. His audience has helped him scale up and pursue increasingly ambitious RC plane designs full-time. To date, he has over 200 videos showcasing massive RC versions of a ViperJet, a Boeing 787-9, and a C-17 Globemaster. Ramy’s most recent build prior to the new Boeing was the world’s largest RC Airbus A380, which came in at a staggering 800 pounds with a 32-foot wingspan.
The entire plane was built out of sections and 3D molded foam and attached together. Image: Ramy RC.
The Boeing 777-9X build started, like others, with a digital 3D model scaled down to 1/7 the size of the actual jet. With the proportions locked in, Ramy and his team then used a CNC mill to cut out separate foam parts for the plane’s fuselage, nose, and wings. Each section was reinforced with carbon fiber sheeting and sprayed with a thin layer of plastic for protection. Long runs of wiring were threaded through the plane to power systems like the wing flaps and landing gear doors. The whole aircraft is propelled by a pair of large electric ducted fans mounted where the real jet’s engines would sit.
Ramy decided to take a ride on top of his plane, Flintstones style. Image: Ramy RC .
Once assembled, Ramy used a remote control to taxi the plane around his outdoor tarmac. To drive home just how absurdly large the thing is, Ramy himself climbed on top and straddled his creation as it rolled around the facility. Once the team felt confident it was airworthy, they painted it white and blue with bold Boeing lettering along its side.
Ramy entrusted the plane’s maiden flight to a surprise guest: filmmaker Tyler Perry. The director is also an avid RC enthusiast and has credited these jumbo models like Ramy’s for helping him conquer his fear of flying. With the controller in his hands, the RC Boeing slowly powered up and its ground wheel started churning. It drove toward the end of the tarmac, then pitched up and went airborne, the buzz of its electric fans heard from the ground. Perry flew the plane for a few passes before bringing it down for a smooth landing worthy of a movie.
Around the mid-20th century, trains were in trouble. After the first rail lines were laid in 1804 England, the locomotive’s steamy forward chug seemed unstoppable. For over a century, trains were the unmatched champion for anyone looking to get somewhere further than a short horse ride away.
But by the late 1950s, that all started to change. The automobile’s rapid technological ascent meant more commuters were opting to get behind the wheel than on commuter trains. Air travel, propped up by significant government backing in the U.S. and Europe, shed rail’s ridership further by making long-distance travel faster. On top of all that, vast stretches of rail infrastructure across France, Belgium, and the Netherlands lay in rubble, casualties of World War II German bombing runs.
With rail’s future in limbo, ambitious engineers came to the rescue…or at least tried to. The post-war period produced some radical design gambles, but none were quite as conceptually ambitious as France’s short-lived Aérotrain.
It looked like a striking, comic-book-evoking silver tube, featuring a curved nose, reminiscent of a jetliner cockpit. The shiny steel body looked like a glistening cross between a train car and an Airstream camper, with bold red lettering streaked along its side.
Maybe most eye-catching of all though was its tail, which featured another giant rotating propeller or a jet engine, depending on the model. The Aérotrain hovered above the ground without wheels and propelled itself forward using an aircraft engine capable of churning out up to 12,000 pounds of thrust, roughly equivalent to the roar of a small jet engine at takeoff. That powerful engine meant the Aérotrain could reach speeds approaching 270 miles per hour, fast enough to leave conventional rail in the dust. In December 1969, Popular Sciencecalled the train-plane hybrid “the first guided vehicle to ride on air instead of wheels.”
An unfinished section of the Aérotrain rail sits in a rural French field. Image: Shutterstock PHILIPPE MONTIGNY
The first hovertrain: fast, floating, and loud
The Aérotrain was the brainchild of French inventor Jean Bertin, who founded the firm Bertin & Cie after studying aeronautics. His concept (initially called the Terraplane) adapted hovercraft technology recently developed in Britain and applied it to a fixed-track train. The vehicle rode atop a cushion of pressurized air pumped downward between it and a concrete track shaped like an inverted T, lifting it so it never made physical contact with the surface.
That absence of friction from the ground meant it could reach top speeds faster than a typical rail car. It also meant less wear and tear from contact with the Earth which, in theory at least, meant less need to constantly repair degrading parts.
Bertin essentially borrowed this “ground effect” principle, where compressed air between a low-flying wing and the ground surface builds up pressure leading to upward lift, from the aviation industry. And that wasn’t its only similarity to planes. Instead of using a traditional motor to push itself forward, it used aircraft propellers powered by powerful turboshaft engines mounted on top of the cabin.
One of the later Aérotrain prototypes, which set a record for train speed at the time, used the same engine found on early Boeing 727 commercial airliners. That meant it was shockingly fast, but also head-rattlingly loud. The result was something like a ground level airplane that moved along a track.
Cohen says that resemblance to an airplane wasn’t accidental. Bertin had a background as an aeronautical engineer. On a broader level, academics and scientists at the time were fascinated with recent advances in airplane and jet propulsion showcased during WWII and wanted to apply it anywhere they could.
“There was this sense that airplane technology could be applied on the ground or overwater and underwater and you could get kind of frictionless or semi-frictionless transportation at high speeds, very high speeds and it was not seen as pie in the sky,” Cohen says. “It was seen as a viable form of technology that could transform ground transportation.”
Several prototypes were developed, but the most successful of the bunch carried 80 passengers in two rows of two seats. The design intrigued members of the French government who viewed it as a quick way to connect the city center to airports. Though Bertin had proposed versions meant for suburban travel, the train’s noisiness and need for purpose-built concrete guide paths made it a hard sell for more urban areas.
But after years of trial and error, Bertin did eventually receive a contract to build out a line connecting Paris’s La Défense business district with the town of Cergy-Pontoise. Despite multiple prototypes, the Aérotrain would never transport passengers along the route, or any route for that matter.
The Aérotrain was bred from a culture of science and tech optimism
The Aérotrain, and a handful of international copycats that would follow it, were a product of their environment. Kennesaw State College Professor and train historian Albert J. Churella tells Popular Science the fact that hovertrain concepts gained traction was in large part a byproduct of postwar optimism. There was a sense that recent advances in science and technology could reliably reshape the world around us, and quickly. Journalists and newscasters drawn to the sleek, sci-fi looking designs were also more than willing to amplify that optimism further.
The July 2000 issue of Popular Science describes how researchers at Tohoku University Institute of Fluid Science in Sendai, Japan, were designing a modern Aerotrain that could go 310 mph. Image: Popular Science, July 2000 issue
“Interest in hovertrains must be seen in the context of the technological enthusiasm of the post-World War II period—a time when many Americans believed that science and technology could work miracles,” Churella said. That same optimism also applied to European countries across the Atlantic.
“After all, they had grown up alongside impressive new developments, including Nylon, Rayon, penicillin, jet aircraft, and nuclear power that promised to generate electricity that was ‘too cheap to meter.’”
Cohen echoes that point.
“Both in France and in the US at this time, there’s tremendous optimism about the power of technology to transform lives,” he says.
But the Aérotrain’s single contracted route never actually came to pass. Ballooning costs and development delays dampened public support. A global recession and oil crisis in the 1970s left the French government, whose funding was essential, with increasingly little appetite for large, time-consuming infrastructure gambles.
Shifting attitudes away from flashy, high tech bets and towards more practical utilitarian solutions also reportedly played a role, as did a perception of these projects that they catered particularly to the wealthy. With daily expenses climbing, the average French citizen simply stopped seeing the value in cool but unproven technology they may never personally experience, a feeling captured by city planner Pierre Merlin, quoted by researcher Vincent Guigueno in the journal Technology and Culture:
“It will not be the average Jean-Claude Z who takes the Aérotrain, but his CEO who will travel either to Orly Airport or his factory in the new town of Trappes from the company’s head office located in the Tour Main-Montparnasse,” Merlin wrote.
John Volpe, President Nixon’s Secretary of Transportation, detailed some of those prototypes in a 1969 issue of Popular Science. Rohr’s Aerotrain showed promise, and even received a Department of Transportation contract to test an experimental version in Pueblo, Colorado, but like its French forefather, it died under the weight of mounting costs.
And while a $90 million investment (especially in the 1960s) might sound like a decent chunk of change, Churella says the funding was never sufficient to make a radically new rail technology viable. Worse, spreading the investment across multiple competing approaches doomed any single one from gaining real momentum. Plus, aside from eye-grabbing news reports, Churella says everyday commuters simply weren’t all that interested in the hovertrain’s success, one way or the other.
“Hovertrains were an idea without an application, and a concept without a viable market,” Churella says. “It was something that very few people wanted, and no one needed.”
A prototype of French inventor Jean Bertin’s Aérotrain was exhibited in 2013 in Paris. Image: Siren-Com / CC BY-SA 3.0
“The story of the hovertrains shows the dangers of technological exuberance,” Churella says. “It is all well and good to propose innovative new technologies, but they must serve a purpose.”
In the end, the upfront cost of building entirely new concrete or electromagnetic guideways made the economics of hovertrains nearly impossible to justify. Prior assumptions about the limitations of traditional rail also proved premature.
Incremental advances in conventional wheel-on-rail technology produced today’s high-speed trains—not quite as fast as the Aérotrain, but close enough, and crucially compatible with over a century of existing infrastructure. Today, France’s TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) high speed rail system is essentially a lightweight, highly refined version of the classic locomotive designs from the early 1800s.
Still, Cohen notes that viewing Bertin’s Aérotrainand the subsequent exploration of hovertrains as a total failure misses a broad point. Refinements of that underlying technology did eventually seed the development of maglev trains, which hover using powerful electromagnets rather than compressed air.
Today, a handful of maglev lines operate in China, Japan, and South Korea at incredible speeds. The most famous of them, Shanghai’s Transrapid, covers roughly 19 miles between Pudong International Airport and Longyang Road station in eight minutes, and is capable of 268 miles per hour—though its cruising speed is capped at around 186 mph.
And maglev tech, initially pitched as a commuter rail solution, has arguably had an even larger impact in other, unexpected applications, from airport luggage transportation and wind turbine parts to numerous military uses. If you peel back the onion far enough, all of those can be traced back to Bertin and his whack train-plane hybrid.
“That’s my lesson,” Cohen said. “to say [new technologies] are wacko is missing the point.” Despite where an individual invention ends up, new tech is “going to have all sorts of other applications”—applications we might not be able to see for decades to come.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
To effectively travel on Mars, rovers need to deal with a lot of sand. German engineers have created a new kind of ground rover that uses swimming motions to push through sand that may otherwise cause the wheels to get stuck. Its inspiration: the African sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard known for burrowing into the Sahara Desert and literally swimming through its sand like a fish. It’s one of the animal kingdom’s strangest methods of propulsion, but it may help shape the future of Mars exploration.
A video of the rover, released this week by the University of Würzburg, shows a mini-fridge-sized, silver rover making its way through a sandy, Martian-mimicking test floor. Rather than rolling forward, each of its four wheels cuts through the sand in what looks like a figure-eight motion. The rover pushes on several yards and then cuts a corner and returns to where it started.
“The wheels mimic the animal’s [sandfish’s]characteristic interaction with the ground, generating both longitudinal and lateral forces,” University of Würzburg researcher Amenosis Lopez said in a statement. “The rover leaves sinusoidal tracks in the sand.”
The sandfish: nature’s cute solution to slippery sand
Though most people likely associate space rovers with round wheels or tracks reminiscent of those on WALL-E, neither design is ideal for dealing with Mars’s uniquely harsh and sandy environment. Sand is unique because it’s a material with both solid and liquid-like qualities. On top of sand’s mixed texture, rovers roaming on the Red Planet have to deal with steep slopes and uneven terrain, where varying levels of slipperiness can cause imbalance. Patches of softer sand are also a nightmare for wheels, making the prospect of a rover getting stuck never far from mind
But nature figured out a solution to this issue millions of years ago, and it’s called the sandfish. Contrary to its name, the Sahara Desert native is a lizard in the skink family. Above ground, the sandfish uses its tiny legs to scrabble around much the same as any lizard. Things get more interesting when it burrows down into the sand. X-ray imaging shows the sandfish propelling itself forward under the sand, using a powerful waving motion to generate thrust and overcome drag. The result looks like an animal swimming through the sand, remarkably similarly to how a fish would oscillate its body to move through water
Engineers at Georgia Tech took those observations and used them to create their own sandfish robot in 2011. Testing with their robots showed that the little lizard’s oddly wedged shaped head may also help it generate lift forces and more easily swim through sand.
Sink or swim: new rover did both
Researchers working on the sandfish-inspired robot said it outperformed a wheeled version when navigating through a sandy test track. Where the round wheels would wobble and weave, the oscillating wheels stayed relatively stable. That’s not to say the new approach worked right out of the gate. Early models of the design were reportedly so heavy that the rover literally sank into the sand. The team went back to the drawing board and made a second version, this time increasing each wheel’s width and reducing overall mass
It’s unlikely these oddball new wheels will become the main chassis system for NASA rovers, at least not in the immediate future. More work still needs to be done to increase their overall controllability and account for slippage that can occur in complicated, real-world environments. There are also the added variables of accounting for scientific instruments and other cargo a rover might have to carry.
More than anything, the wheel design is a testament to the sandfish’s innate ingenuity and evolutionary gifts. Many scientists only recently began to truly appreciate these traits and what other technology they could inspire.
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