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Reinventing the Wheel

Planning a trip to the Moon? Mars? You’re going to need good tires…

Exploration requires mobility. And whether you’re on Earth or as far away as the Moon or Mars, you need good tires to get your vehicle from one place to another. Our decades-long work developing tires for space exploration has led to new game-changing designs and materials. Yes, we’re reinventing the wheel—here’s why.

Wheels on the Moon

Early tire designs were focused on moving hardware and astronauts across the lunar surface. The last NASA vehicle to visit the Moon was the Lunar Roving Vehicle during our Apollo missions. The vehicle used four large flexible wire mesh wheels with stiff inner frames. We used these Apollo era tires as the inspiration for new designs using newer materials and technology to better function on a lunar surface.

Up springs a new idea

During the mid-2000s, we worked with industry partner Goodyear to develop the Spring Tire, an airless compliant tire that consists of several hundred coiled steel wires woven into a flexible mesh, giving the tires the ability to support high loads while also conforming to the terrain. The Spring Tire has been proven to generate very good traction and durability in soft sand and on rocks.

Spring Tires for Mars

A little over a year after the Mars Curiosity Rover landed on Mars, engineers began to notice significant wheel damage in 2013 due to the unexpectedly harsh terrain. That’s when engineers began developing new Spring Tire prototypes to determine if they would be a new and better solution for exploration rovers on Mars.

In order for Spring Tires to go the distance on Martian terrain, new materials were required. Enter nickel titanium, a shape memory alloy with amazing capabilities that allow the tire to deform down to the axle and return to its original shape.

These tires can take a lickin’

After building the shape memory alloy tire, Glenn engineers sent it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Life Test Facility. It performed impressively on the punishing track.

Why reinvent the wheel? It’s worth it.

New, high performing tires would allow lunar and Mars rovers to explore greater regions of the surface than currently possible. They conform to the terrain and do not sink as much as rigid wheels, allowing them to carry heavier payloads for the same given mass and volume. Also, because they absorb energy from impacts at moderate to high speeds, there is potential for use on crewed exploration vehicles which are expected to move at speeds significantly higher than the current Mars rovers.

Airless tires on Earth

Maybe. Recently, engineers and materials scientists have been testing a spinoff tire version that would work on cars and trucks on Earth. Stay tuned as we continue to push the boundaries on traditional concepts for exploring our world and beyond.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Supervised Machine Learning Trainer 3607A

Speculative Design video short from Benedict Hubener, Keyur Jain, and James Zhou of CIID imagines how the future of Smart City maintenence works, with on-site engineers handling Machine Learning equipment with surveillance infrastructure:

In the near future, cities are filled with smart infrastructure such as decentralized security cameras, self-sorting trashcans and intelligent street lights. But who do you call when smart things breaks? The future smart city is not a sci-fi dystopia made out of glass, concrete, and job stealing robots. It’s place much like our own and filled with the banality of everyday life and mundane jobs. Regardless of how you imagine the future smart city, someone needs to get in their white van, take out their ladder, and fix broken things.

The SMLT 3607A or Supervised Machine Learning Trainer is a tool for the future city maintenance worker. He/she can use the SMLT to interface with abnormally behaving smart infrastructure such as a surveillance camera identifying people as eggplants. He/she can retrain the smart camera by recording new examples in real time. The future maintenance worker will teach the camera what it’s seeing and curator the training dataset. He/she will help the camera learn the difference between people and objects and decide who should be classified as an upstanding citizen or a petty criminal.

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Elephant-octopus-inspired robotics

Festo’s BionicMotionRobot takes inspiration from the delicate precision movements of an elephant’s trunk and an octopus’ tentacles to create what is undoubtedly the least adorable robot we’ve featured on the MW blog.

Struggle no more – Virtually choose your nail polish color

In an effort to solve the trial-by-purchase problem, the nail gurus at Sally Hansen are introducing a new app which lets you virtually paint on nail polish.

With ManiMatch, there’s no need to upload a photo or take a picture. Launch the app and put your hand in front of the camera and it starts scanning to determine your skin tone in order to provide color recommendations. Choose one, and the app paints the color right onto your nails then, Voila! Your nails on the screen.

Plastic Girls

Short film by Nils Clauss explores the spaces that use female-form robotic mannequins around South Korea to attract business:

With slow graceful movements and digitally generated messages, Plastic Girls make a conspicuous contribution to the sexualisation of public space in front of their owners premises.

PLASTIC GIRLS is the last film of a Korea related trilogy following BIKINI WORDS and LAST LETTERS:

vimeo.com/151000182 vimeo.com/195284427

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Please meet our terrible fur sons

Using Google’s open-source machine-learning project called Tensorflow, Christopher Hesse created edges2cats, where you draw a design and it’s filled in with… cat. It makes monsters.

“Job Done” - RTS Prototype

Worked on the basics of a Real Time Strategy game prototype today, with selecting and commanding units, and worker units automatically searching for resources on the map, mining them, and returning to their base to store the resources gathered.

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