The Big Moon Dig/Caterpillar

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  The moving inflatable habitat

Inspiration - Human space exploration provides a positive vision of the future. It is needed for the problems facing the 21st century.

What it does - Demonstration that you can crawl a habitat by cycling airbladders underneath once it lands on the moon. It will move have to be move from the landing site to the trench that is being built by robots.

How we built it Using Arduino controller, tapped lunch bags, and five air pumps that move the bags in a caterpillar type motion to move it forward.

Challenges we ran into leaks of air in the original airbags, We used balloons, and thin hefty bags. Finally settling on thicker plastic bags with tape and a hot glue gun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of - It moves slowly, but it moves forward.

What we learned - Hot glue will melt thin plastic. The movement is so slow that it is ok for the real thing, but boring in a model.

What's next for The Big Moon Dig/Caterpillar - We would have to build much more rugged bladders and write more short stories to engage the audience.

Built With

• arduino
• c-language
• custom-card
• makeblock-air-pumps