MIT engineers have designed a walking lunar robot cleverly inspired by the animal kingdom. The “mix-and-match” system is made of worm-like robotic limbs astronauts could configure into various “species” of robots resembling spiders, elephants, goats and oxen. The team won the Best Paper Award...

We're going to need a lot of robots to handle dangerous tasks once we get to the Moon, and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a solution: Modular, wheel-free walking robots made from a bunch of reconfigurable parts. 

When astronauts begin to build a permanent base on the moon, as NASA plans to do in the coming years, they’ll need help. Robots could potentially do the heavy lifting by laying cables, deploying solar panels, erecting communications towers, and building habitats. But if each robot is designed...

MIT's award-winning BART and MARGE architecture can reliably produce, store, and distribute 50 tons of rocket propellant per year on the surface of Mars. BART handles all aspects of production, storage, and distribution of propellant, while MARGE provides power for the operation.