Thursday, May 14, 2009

Team Italia conceives Bot Swarm to win Google Lunar X-Prize

An impossibly huge notional unit, part of a swarm of similar robots GLXP Team Italia has announced it may use to win the Google Lunar X-Prize, looms over the lunar Nearside

Jeremy Hsu, Space.com - "What began as a glimmer in the mind's eye for one robotics researcher has grown into a national endeavor for Team Italia, one of 17 groups competing for the Google Lunar X Prize.

"Team Italia has evolved," said Piero Messina, president of the Naples-based International Association for the Aerospace Culture (AICA) that is coordinating Team Italia. Messina helped pull together all the major Italian aerospace and engineering universities, as well as the two largest Italian aerospace companies, to support the race to land a robot on the moon by 2012.

"The idea to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize crystallized around the vision of Alberto Rovetta, a professor of robot mechanics at Politecnico di Milano. Rovetta's designs for lunar robots resemble skittering spiders or crabs that could deploy as a swarm of mobile cameras and sensors on both legs and wheels."
Read the article HERE.

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