Fink Using Robots for 'House Hunting on Mars'

Though it's far off from your standard house, researchers at the University of Arizona are looking to use robots to tour suitable habitats for explorers on Mars. In a recent interview with FOX 10 News, ECE associate professor Wolfgang Fink describes a robotic network that would allow rovers and even submersibles to work independently from human input, exploring caves under the Martian surface.

"Caves basically give you the shielding from radiation and from impacts," Fink said. "If you drop communication nodes, and you have more than one robot doing that, you establish a communication network inside the cave."

The robot network would explore up to nine caves already identified with aerial imaging, in the hopes of finding the best location for astronauts to create semi-permanent stations. Continuously monitoring their environment and maintaining awareness of where they are in space, the rovers proceed on their own, connected to each other via a wireless data connection, deploying these communication nodes along the way. Fink describes the process as a kind of "breadcrumb trail."

"For the most part, we're connected wherever we go, but on Mars, for example, that's not the case because there's no such thing as a cell phone tower. There's no GPS system," Fink explained to Mashable. "So basically, this is a communication infrastructure on the go."