Iván Hernández Dalas: From sea to space, this robot is on a roll
Rishi Jangale and Derek Pravecek with RoboBall III. Image credit: Emily Oswald/Texas A&M Engineering. By Alyssa Schaechinger While working at NASA in 2003, Dr. Robert Ambrose, director of the Robotics and Automation Design Lab (RAD Lab), designed a robot with no fixed top or bottom. A perfect sphere, the RoboBall could not flip over, and its shape promised access to places wheeled or legged machines could not reach — from the deepest lunar crater to the uneven sands of a beach. Two of his students built the first prototype, but then Ambrose shelved the idea to focus on drivable rovers for astronauts. When Ambrose arrived at Texas A&M University in 2021, he saw a chance to reignite his idea. With funding from the Chancellor’s Research Initiative and Governor’s University Research Initiative, Ambrose brought RoboBall back to life. Now, two decades after the original idea, RoboBall is rolling across Texas A&M University. Driven by graduate students Rishi Jangale and Dere...