You may remember Zoidberg. No, not the character from the animated series Futurama, though that’s where it got its name.
We're talking about the grabbing tool that Boise State’s Microgravity Team built for NASA to collect rock and dust samples off an asteroid. They got to take it to the underwater NASA lab to test it out.
When we reported on Zoidberg ten years ago, the team was talking about building another tool, this one would be an autonomous robot that could collect rocks off the moon or Mars.
Flash forward a decade, and now a new team, a student-run engineering company at Boise State, has just tested a custom-built lunar robot called Bender 5.0. It's at a lab in Florida that recreates what it’s like on the surface of the moon.
The instructors for the team, known as Bender Autonomous Robotic Systems or Bender ARS, Steve Swanson, retired NASA astronaut, who’s also the Boise State Distinguished Educator in Residence, and Oliver MacDonald, Computing PhD Student at BSU, along with Bender Alumni and Electrical Engineer student Jhonathan Yallico, and Mechanical Engineering Student Kyle Bailey, Bender Drivetrain Team Member, joined Idaho Matters to talk more.
