Why send one massive, expensive spacecraft when you can send thousands of small ones? Swarm robotics applies the logic of ants and bees to industrial space exploration.
A typical swarm mission consists of a central processing hub and hundreds of expendable worker units.
Stays in a safe orbit. It contains the high-power processors, communication dish to Earth, and the refinery/smelter.
Small, simple robots. They have limited intelligence but work together to lift heavy objects or map complex terrain.
Visualization of distributed mesh network communication.
In a traditional mission, if the main drill breaks, the mission is over. In a swarm, if 50 robots are destroyed by rockfalls, the other 450 continue the job.
A single large rover can only dig in one spot. A swarm can prospect an entire asteroid surface simultaneously, reducing exploration time by 90%.
Swarm robots can physically latch onto each other to form larger structures, bridges, or levers to move obstacles that are too heavy for a single unit.