Compared to the traditional rover, the construction of Hedgehog robot is somewhat low-priced and quite a number. To inhibit this condition, NASA scientists are pouring issues a Hedgehog robot estimated to tumble and hop on your attention they don’t use rollers to push. Instead of rolling around on wheels right side up, the Hedgehog contains three flywheels inside of a cube, which let it hop and tumble around the landscape, and operate with no right way up.

The Hedgehog is shaped like a cube with spikes.

Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University appeared to have come up with a solution to this problem with the concept for a Hedgehog robot that is particularly designed to overcome the challenges of navigating in small bodies in the solar system. The robot is in early development but the agency claimed that it would resemble the movement of a hedgehog. “The spikes could also house instruments such as thermal probes to take the temperature of the surface as the robot tumbles”, added Nesmas. The robot even has a move called the “tornado” by which it can spin itself up and out of a depression.

Two Hedgehog prototypes exist thus far, one with blunt corners and one with leg-like spines that can serve as sampling probes. During 180 parabolas, over the course of four flights, these robots demonstrated several types of maneuvers that would be useful for getting around on small bodies with reduced gravity.

Scientists put under test these maneuvers on different materials that mimic a vast range of surfaces: sandy, rough and rocky, slippery and icy, and soft and crumbly.

The prototypes were able to perform controlled hopping and tumbling in these environments.

The robot weighs in about 11 pounds, but researchers said it could weigh for more than 20 pounds with equipment such as spectrometers and cameras. The idea is that an orbiting mothership would transmit the signals to and from the robots in a similar manner that Curiosity and Opportunity communicate through satellites that orbit Mars.