Running on the soft sandy beach is pretty hard and can take a breath out of one in no time. Let's see how the little DynaRoach - lizard inspired robot performs on sand.
Six legged DynaRoach robot, only 10 centimeters (4 inches) long and 25 grams light, built in Complex Rheology and Biomechanics lab (CRAB) sure has the skills to move across the desert sands quite effortlessly. To display this in numbers, it can reach a top speed of 1.8 km/h (1.1 mph) meaning it can cover a distance, five times longer than its own body length in just one second, which makes this little robot almost as fast as some real desert lizards.
The DynaRoach robot provided the scientists and engineers with the new and important data on how the real desert lizards scamper through the sand. These new realisations could be found to be more than helpful when building new and better vehicles for exploring the Mars surface. Well you better see it for yourself, how the sand lizard inspired DynaRoach robot performs on sand:
