[gary]

In a August 8th 2017 article at the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum Magazine website,
Evan Ackerman reports on JPL's design for the "Automaton Rover for
Extreme Environments" (AREE).

The problem for robots in extreme environments such as the surface
of Venus is that the electronics is subjected to extreme heat.
In the case of Venus, 464 °C.

The Soviet Venera probes lasted only a couple of hours. Their electronics
were encapsulated in a hermetically sealed titanium pressure vessel.

The team of engineers behind AREE have been experimenting with
substituting many of the electrical and electronic components for
mechanical counterparts in an attempt to increase system reliability.

Originally Posted by Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum

With funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the JPL team wants to see whether it might be possible to build a Venus exploration rover without conventional sensors, computers, or power systems. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) would use clockwork gears and springs and other mechanisms to provide the majority of the rover’s functionality, including power generation, power storage, sensing, locomotion, and even communication: no electronics required. Bring on the heat.

Originally Posted by Jonathan Sauder, JPL

We started out in our NIAC Phase I proposal thinking that we were going to build a fully mechanical rover architecture that would not use any electrical subsystems or electronics at all, replacing all the standard electrical subsystems with mechanical computing. As we started to dig into it more, we realized that you can’t build a traditional Mars Curiosity-style rover with a centralized core processor ... Instead, what we’ve had to do is focus on something that gives more of a distributed architecture, where we have many simple mechanisms around the device, guiding it, signaling it, telling it where to go.

Originally we were going to try to do a number of our scientific measurements mechanically as well. As we started to look into that, we just couldn’t quite get the resolution of data that you need to image or measure things like temperature and pressure. There are some various high-temperature electronics that have been developed—silicon carbide and gallium systems—that do operate at high temperatures. The problem is that they’re at a really low level of integration. So what that means is that you can’t do traditional electrical systems with them, and you can’t do anything close to what would be required for a rover. So our idea is to built a mobility platform that would be able to locomote, seeing new places and operating for a lot longer than you could with the systems that currently exist.

The primary goal is to first design our locomotion architecture to be as robust as possible. And then the second goal is to use as many simple, distributed, reactive mechanisms as we can to sort of guide the rover as it works its way across the surface of Venus.

Article here :-
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/r...-explore-venus