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Swiss researchers are testing a semi-autonomous robot that could be used to explore Mars without constant human guidance, speeding up the search for minerals, water, and even traces of ancient life on other worldsor exoplanets.
The four-legged robot, named ANYmal, looks more like a robotic dog than a traditional rover. But strapped to its body is a robotic arm wielding a microscopic imager and a Raman spectrometer — a scanner that can read and identify the chemical fingerprint of a rock.
Researchers at the University of Basel have been putting ANYmal through its paces at their “Marslabor”. This is a simulation facility designed to mimic the dusty and rocky surfaces of Mars and the Moon.
The objective set for ANYmal was straightforward: navigate independently, identify rocks of scientific interest, analyse them, and transmit the results — all without human guidance.
In the trials, recently published in Frontiers in Space Technologies, the robot successfully analysed multiple rocks in sequence, identifying gypsum (a soft, sulfate mineral), carbonates, basalts, and lunar-analogue materials such as dunite and anorthosite.
ANYmal completed missions autonomously in just 12 to 23 minutes. A human operator doing the same job took 41 minutes. However, it should be noted that human oversight produced slightly more detailed and marginally higher accuracy.
Current Mars rovers operate under near-constant supervision from Earth, covering only a few hundred metres per day. Employing a robot capable of making its own scientific decisions could dramatically accelerate the pace of exploration.
The study also reinforces that legged robots, which can step over obstacles and adjust to variable terrain, could reach scientifically valuable areas that wheeled rovers cannot.
Taken together, the research points toward a future in which robots like ANYmal are not just tools operated from afar, but active scientific participants, capable of independently hunting for biosignatures, the chemical traces that could indicate ancient life on faraway planets.