NASA’s Slithering Snake-Like Robot Could Explore Deep Space

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a snake-like robot to autonomously map and explore previously inaccessible destinations.

Dubbed EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor(Opens in a new window)), the self-propelled bot can navigate a variety of terrains on Earth, the Moon, and “far beyond,” according to JPL(Opens in a new window), which says EELs is inspired by a desire to look for signs of life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

“Though some robots are better at one particular type of terrain or other, the idea for EELS is the ability to do it all,” project manager Matthew Robinson said in a statement. “When you’re going places where you don’t know what you’ll find, you want to send a versatile, risk-aware robot that’s prepared for uncertainty—and can make decisions on its own.”

Since its inception in 2019, the serpentine cyborg has undergone numerous revisions; in its current, 13-foot-long, 220-pound form, EELS 1.0 comprises 10 identical segments that rotate, using a mix of screw threads for propulsion, traction, and grip.

Due to the communications lab time between Earth and deep space, EELS was tailor made to autonomously sense its environment, calculate risk, travel, and gather data with yet-to-be-determined instruments. When something goes wrong, the robot should be able to recover without human assistance.

“Imagine a car driving autonomously, but there are no stop signs, no traffic signals, not even any roads,” said the project’s autonomy lead, Rohan Thakker. “The robot has to figure out what the road is and try to follow it. Then it needs to go down a 100-foot drop and not fall.”

It does that by creating a 3D map of its surroundings using four pairs of stereo camera and LiDAR; based on that data, navigation algorithms determine the safest path forward. In its final form, the bot will contain 48 actuators, or, as Thakker called them, “48 steering wheels,” for freedom of movement.

The droid is currently slithering around sandy, snow, and icy environments—from JPL’s Mars Yard to a “robot playground” built in a Southern California ski resort to a local indoor ice rink.

“We have a different philosophy of robot development than traditional spacecraft, with many quick cycles of testing and correcting,” according to Hiro Ono, EELS principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion lab.

“There are dozens of textbooks about how to design a four-wheel vehicle, but there is no textbook about how to design an autonomous snake robot to boldly go where no robot has gone before,” he continued. “We have to write our own. That’s what we’re doing now.”