The four-legged robot Olympus on ESA’s Mars yard
Meet Olympus, a four-legged robot developed and built by Jørgen Anker Olsen, visiting PhD researcher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
In this image, Olympus is positioned in the European Space Agency’s Mars yard, a facility simulating the rocky and sandy surface of Mars – an environment the robot was created for. The Mars yard is part of ESA’s Planetary Robotics Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands.
Mounted upside down to a floating platform in another one of ESA’s labs, the ORBIT facility, Olympus gets to experience simulated microgravity in two dimensions, allowing Jørgen to better understand how the robot would move under conditions it was created for: the gravity on Mars, which is about 2.5 times weaker than Earth’s gravity.
[Image description: This is a photo of a four-legged robot. The robot is made of grey and black metal and it is positioned on a rocky, uneven surface covered in orange dust, simulating the terrain found on the surface of Mars. Each of the robot’s four legs consists of two limbs with a bending joint, connected at the bottom in a paw-like patch. In the top part of the image, a large blue banner shows the European Space Agency’s logo and a text that reads ‘Planetary Robotics Lab’.]
