Humans may have gotten us up to space, but we owe many of our stellar successes to robots. From automating menial tasks and supervising repairs to someday conducting emergency surgery, robots have taken on a lot of jobs aboard the International Space Station and other vital spacecraft—and as we continue to explore the stars, they’ll likely continue to do so. But having a handful of robots, each with its hyper-specific uses, isn’t always practical. To MIT, flexibility is vital.

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 last week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace Conference.

No single robot can perform all tasks, yet bringing a bunch of different robots along on Moon missions would be quite inefficient. The WORMS setup offers an alternative, in the form of components that can be mixed and matched to make whatever robot is needed. Its name an acronym for “Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System,” WORMS was developed by a team of MIT engineers led by PhD candidate and graduate instructor George Lordos. He suggested the word “oligomeric,” which is a Greek term for “a few parts.”

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 we finally get to space, we will need a variety of robots to help us survive. MIT took this idea to the next level by introducing mix-and-match robots that can be assembled into countless configurations useful for different tasks.

The new systems are called WORMS, for the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System. According to a press release by MIT published on Tuesday, they could revolutionize how we approach space robotics.

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 for a specific action or task, a moon base could become overrun by a zoo of machines, each with its own unique parts and protocols.

MIT’s ARTEMIS Steelworks team selected as finalist in NASA’s 2023 BIG Idea Challenge.

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.

Taking home top prize, Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented their concept for a Bipropellant All-in-one In-situ Resource Utilization Truck & Mobile Autonomous Reactor Generating Electricity (BART & MARGE).

NASA has selected fifteen undergraduate and graduate finalist teams to advance to the next phase of the agency’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition and present their concepts to NASA and aerospace industry leaders at a forum in June.