Feb 17, 20213 min read

The Martian robot design

The bionic wheel bot and its influencer

This robot is completely inspired by a spider that lives in the Moroccan desert. It had only just been discovered in 2008 by Ingo Rechenberg, who happens to be a Germen professor in bionics with a passion for studying desert animals and has been doing so for over 30 years. The spider uses a profound technique to evade predators. By cartwheeling down or up the sandy dunes using its legs to spring itself forwards and carry on the motion until it is safe. By doing this the spider can double its speed and go from moving one meter ps to two meters ps. This feet of movement is completely unique in the animal kingdom, and the professor named it the flic-flac spider, from the germen description of a backwords hand spring. In 2014 the flic-flac spider was given its scientific name (Cebrennus Rechenbergi) named after its founder. The average size of a flic-flac spider is 19mm and they come from the family of huntsmen spiders that use venom to immobilize their pray, this spider is nocturnal and hunts moths in the dark.

Ingo Rechenberg asked Festo’s, Germen automation company to work with him in designing a bionic spider robot that uses similar techniques to get about as the flic-flac spider dos to evade predators. Ingo Rechenberg new that this variety of mobility would be ideal for tackling a wide diversity of terrains, and could be used on the ocean bed, in agriculture and on mars. The outcome was the Bionic wheel bot which is 55cm in length and has 8 legs which are controlled by 15 motors that are found in the body and knee joints. It uses 6 of its legs to roll with and the remaining 2 to propel itself forward with every rotation. With walking it still only uses 6 legs as the other 2 are equipped to integrated sensors that tell the robot the exact point to repeat the push whilst rolling. Much like the flic-flac spider its much faster at rolling than walking and because of these varieties in movement much less likely to get stuck like past rovers.

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Festo specialise in a branch of robotics could bionics. This is the design and engineering of machanical systems that are derived from living organisms.

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Costume designer for The Martian, Janty Yates

Made by FBFX in London

The goal was to make a fictional spacesuit as polarisable as possible by incorporating real life space exploration technology and equipment into the design.

Janty Yates considered NASA’s prototype Z1 and Z2 spacesuits as inspiration.

Image 6 - NASA’s Z1 prototype spacesuit Image 7 - NASA’s Z2 prototype spacesuit

However the aesthetics of these suits where not what she was looking for. She decided that the Martian suit should be lighter and more slim to the body, emphasising a realistic reality of wearing it every day and performing the physical tasks Mark Watney has to go through to survive.

The outcome of The Martian spacesuit design is fully equipped with proactive survival gear. The bold paters and orange colour incorporated to the suit suggest a search and rescue feel to the aesthetic, however the orange also resembles the colouration of Mars in its abundance of iron oxide.

The Martian spacesuit equipment

- Portable cooling system

- Cooling hoses

- Cooling shirt

- GoPro Hero 4

- Comms Bluetooth head set

- Custom flashlight housing

- Personal arm computer pack

- Valves

- Wild country harness

- Battle belt – manf. TBD

- Several different types of buckles