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NASA's TETwalker Prototype
The TETwalker (TET taken from tetrahedron) is a new robot in the field of exploration and artificial intelligence. Currently only in its preliminary stages of development, the TETwalker prototype robot’s makers hope that their articulating and extending machines will someday roam the surfaces of alien planets (Mars in particular) in swarms of tiny collectively-thinking robots. The TETwalker prototype is not yet the tiny machine the designers want to someday realize from their project; however they conceptualize that by utilizing nanoelectromachinery the TETwalker can be miniaturized and mass-produced to function ideologically.
The TETwalker prototype’s method of mobility is an intriguing design of struts that extend and contract to shift the robot’s center of gravity. Thus the TETwalker expands one part of its’ body to fall over, whereupon it contracts back to its’ original form and prepares to repeat the process. The designers also hint in a video on their site that the TETwalkers will be programmed to know how to climb up crevices through contortions of the struts, and work together to construct useful structures. They’ll operate together to coordinate and form these structures using a hive-mind, or as the creators call it; they will form together to make “Autonomous Nanotechnology Swarms” or ANTS.
 This collaboration will be important to the TETwalker because the designers also wish to program the robots to travel through space by themselves by riding the solar winds as sails. The TETwalkers would have to form together to create the sail and coordinate to repair the sail if it comes under a barrage of meteorites.
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