The idea behind sending robots to Mars as advance scouts is twofold: to learn as much about the planet as possible with as little risk as possible. To that end, Rodney Brooks, the creative robotics engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks small. He has already developed one small and relatively inexpensive robot named Attila, but Brooks sees robots becoming even smaller.
He would like to send thousands upon thousands of tiny one-gram robots to Mars. Because there would be so many, each individual robot would be expendable without jeopardizing the mission as a whole.
Brooks calls these tiny robots Tumblebots. They do not exist yet, but he imagines that they would essentially be sensors that could each be programmed to search for a particular element or substance. The Tumblebots might be released from a low-orbiting ship and would then be blown around by the Martian winds like spores. When they settled, they would stick out their sensors. If they found what they were looking for, they would give the orbiting ship a sign, perhaps by turning up a reflector that a sweeping laser on board the ship could detect.
Because Tumblebots would go wherever the winds blow and not to some predetermined spot, they could also offer a first real sense of the absolute unknown.
