NASA ’s bizarreSuper Ball Botis unlike any robot ever built – it uses a net of wires and rods to move , and could someday explore coarse exoplanets . It also has an unlikely heritage : It was inspired by the ideas of a visionary from the 1960s building be adrift cities base on the same concept .
Meet Super Ball, NASA’s First Tensile Robot
Yesterday , the agency upload a new video recording of its Super Ball Bot , which has been under ontogenesis through the NASA ’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program since 2013 .
The bot uses a web of tensioned cables and strong rods to twine over terrain – adapt to uncut drops and unusual geometry in a manner that traditional automaton ca n’t . That ’s thanks to the fact that its movements are curb by tensioned wire that allow it spring and respond to its surroundings . And crucially , the lightweight innovation could be close up into a small package and dropped onto the surface of a planet , like Saturn ’s lunation Titan .
Super Ball is the brainchild ofVytas Sunspiral , a robotics researcher who form on developing golem at NASA Ames ’ Intelligent Systems Division . Sunspiral ’s focus is ontensegrity robots – or machine that use a intercrossed structure of tension and compression element . It ’s a term that was coined by the architect Buckminster Fuller in the early sixties – and it has a entrancing history .
What Is Tensegrity, and Who Discovered It?
There are two basic types of anatomical structure in this universe : compressive ( essentially , fight ) and tensile ( essentially , pulling ) .
In architecture , most edifice function by compression – their columns support the weightiness of the floor above . But in the sixties , a number of architects started experimenting with tensile materials , using stiff textile , wires , and other materials that could stretch to produce social organization .
One of those architects , Buckminster Fuller , was inventing some of the most new and fascinating structures of the century – his most noted being the geodetic noggin . In 1961 , he publisheda paperthat described an entirely new type of social organisation : He call it tensegrity . It combined face of compression and tension to create a tensioned web of wires , in which contraction factor could co - exist .
AP Photo / WGI
It was a revolutionary estimation – a beautiful hybrid structure that merge the best elements of both systems . It ’s also not unlike our own bodies , which use densification elements ( castanets ) and tension elements ( brawn ) to create campaign .
AP
Floating on Cloud 9
Fuller waste no time imagining what types of building and cities he could build using tensegrity .
One famous object lesson was his construct forSpherical Tensegrity Atmospheric Research Stations , aka “ Cloud Nines,”which were cities built inside tensegrity domes that used the structural concept to blow .
The estimation was simple : You could theoretically increase the size of a geodesic dome until it became so unattackable , it would function like a tensegrity - strengthened balloon , with slimly heated zephyr inside .
“ A half sea mile ( 0.8 klick ) diameter geodesic sphere would weigh only one - thousandth of the weight unit of the aura inside of it , ” the websiteStuff of Geniusexplains . “ If the internal air were heat up by either solar energy or even just the median human activeness inside , it would only take a 1 level shift in Fahrenheit over the external temperature to make the sphere float . ”
The New Yorker ’s Elizabeth Kolbertelaborated in 2008 :
He also envisioned what he promise Cloud Nines , communities that would dwell in super lightweight spheres , covered in a polythene skin . As the Dominicus warm up the air inwardly , Fuller claimed , the area and all the buildings within it would rise into the air , like a balloon . “ Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard one - nautical mile - diam and larger cloud structures , ” he wrote .
Of course , Fuller himself admit the surrealism of the Cloud 9 construct .
But tensegrity has been used many time in tangible life since the 1960s , for object lesson in the work of sculptor Kevin Snelson :
prototype : Inhabitat on Flickr / CC
Or in the Kurilpa Bridge in Brisbane , Australia :
Images : Lance on Flickr / CC;Dean Walliss on Flickr / CC
If NASA ’s Super Ball Bot keeps modernize , it could finally take the concept to other reality . And while Fuller ’s mind for a float city definitely looks like scifi to our optic , so does Super Ball .
In the end , Bucky ’s ideas about tensegrity may never end up make new worlds here on Earth – but it may yet drive the geographic expedition of new world in outer space .
touch the author at[email protect ] .
buckminster fullerHistoryNASARobotsSpace
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