SENSORS
Robot swarms for spaceship inspection
Mini-robots as small as a sugar lump might one day bolster the safety of spacecraft.
They’re the size of sugar lumps, but in a swarm, these mini-robots can detect anomalies in the vibrations of spacecraft. | Image: Bahar Haghighat
Space debris and micrometeoroids can damage the hulls of spacecraft. They can be detected in advance by fixed, inbuilt sensors designed to monitor vibrations. Bahar Haghighat, an electrical engineer formerly at EPFL who is today at the University of Groningen, has meanwhile been testing a more flexible solution. In a simulation, she has a swarm of mini-robots crawl over the spacecraft’s hull to detect these vibrations. If one robot breaks down, there’s no problem – there are still enough of them to do the work.
