A fleet of land and airborne robots has been developed to mine, excavate and even build on the Moon.<br />Earth's satellite is rich in resources including basalt, iron, quartz and silicon that could help set up a human colony.<br />Lead author Philip Arm, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said: "Using multiple robots has two advantages.<br />"The individual robots can take on specialised tasks and perform them simultaneously. Moreover, thanks to its redundancy, a robot team is able to compensate for a teammate’s failure."<br />Important measuring equipment would be installed on several machines. Mr Arm said: "Getting the benefits of both is a matter of finding the right balance."<br />The researchers solved this problem by equipping two of the robots as specialists. One was programmed to be particularly good at mapping the terrain and classifying the geology.<br />It used a laser scanner and several cameras – some of them capable of spectral analysis – to gather initial clues about the mineral composition of the rock.<br />The other was taught to precisely identify rocks using a scanning device and a microscopy camera.<br />A third was a generalist - able to both map the terrain and identify rocks. It had a broader range of tasks.<br />But its equipment meant that it could perform these tasks with less precision. SWSCrobot - by Mark Waghorn
