View larger. | Ready for this? It’s a prototype for walking robots on Mars at the Marslabor facility at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Its builders say a robot explorer like this one could be ...

The slowest part of a Mars mission is often not the driving, it is the waiting. A rover can only do so much when every move must be planned from Earth, then checked, then sent back across a gap that ...

Planetary exploration may be about to get a major speed boost. Researchers tested a semi-autonomous robot that can move from rock to rock, analyzing each without waiting for human instructions. The ...

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and university partners are building a case for sending four-legged robots, modeled on the agility of dogs, to explore the Moon and Mars with minimal human oversight.

The robot’s arm descends toward a pale, flat rock. Twelve centimeters. Eight. Five. A foam ring makes contact, a time-of-flight sensor confirms the distance, and a UV light flickers on inside the ...

Planetary surface missions currently operate cautiously. On Mars, communication delays between Earth and rovers (typically between four and 22 minutes), as well as data transfer constraints due to ...

Can autonomous robots help cut space exploration times? This is what a recent study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies hopes to address as a team of scientists from Switzerland and the ...