NASA wants to send the transforming robot to explore Saturn's moons

NASA has announced plans to design robots that can roll, fly, float, and swim to explore Saturn's moons someday in the future. Larger bots are made up of small mini robots that come together. And those big robots are called "Shapeshifter".

The experimental Shapeshifter from NASA looks like a drone mounted in a hamster-like wheel. This wheel can roll (of course), split in half, and these two split halves can hover over small propulsion motors. This flight capability allows them to act as standalone drones for aerial exploration. It is known that NASA created the Shapeshifter with 3D printers.

This robot looks like a drone mounted in a hamster-like wheel.

NASA's team envisions a group of 12 robots (called cobots) that can morph into an underwater exploration device or a group of cave explorers. Robot Shapeshifter is part of a research program that is currently at an early stage called "NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC)". This program includes several stages of capital calling to turn innovative, fiction and reality ideas into reality.

NASA wants to send the Shapeshifter to Saturn's Titan moon.

NASA's idea is to send a robot, such as the Shapeshifter, to explore Saturn's moon Titan . Titanium is the only other object in the solar system with liquid on its surface. This liquid is actually not water but methane . The surface of Titan has been mapped on the Cassini mission and is ready for future missions.

The liquid on Titan is methane and ethane , which are commonly found in the gases on Earth. The NASA team thinks that the surface of Titan must have caves and ammonia eruptions. The Shapeshifter robot concept was launched through a joint project between Stanford University and Cornell. This robot is semi-automatic, and in the future, it will be able to assemble into a large robot from small cobots without orders from Earth.