Jumping baseball bots on Mars.

Boing!

A new idea for the exploration of Mars may be less of a scientific leap forward than a hop. Researchers say a swarm of bouncing, spherical bots the size of baseballs could hop across the red planet to search for life. [...] Sheltered from extreme surface radiation and weather, the underground systems of Mars could hold signs of past life or provide shelter for astronauts from Earth, the scientists say. But the unpredictability of cave formations make the systems hard for robots to explore, Boston says. [...]

In theory, the units could spring over small gaps and or kick their way out of cracks and crevices. Boston thinks the bots could also tackle challenging surface terrain on the red planet, including polar ice caps riddled with fissures. [...] The mostly plastic bot features an extendable foot powered by an artificial muscle. Dubowsky has already used the novel "muscle" polymer in other robots. In the case of the hopping Mars microbots, the plastic muscle would propel the units forward three feet (one meter) once every hour.

The key to the concept, as explained in the article, is distributed computing. Using a cellular communications network, the bots could explore a wide area, then if one finds something interesting, call the others over to help examine it. They could either be deployed from a rover or dropped from above for a wider initial distribution, and for the same mass and weight of the Spirit rover, you could deploy a thousand jumping baseballbots. The researchers hope to test them in an Earth cave some time next year.