By 
May 20th, 2026
Image credit: Marco Schmidt/University of Würzburg
On Mars, could a robot get ticketed for swerving across Martian sands?
Not if you’re VaMEx – short for the Valles Marineris Explorer – a wheeled automaton that makes swimming motions to explore the vast valley on the Red Planet.
VaMEx is an initiative of the German Space Agency at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). This Mars machinery uses innovative wheels, which, like those of a desert lizard, can “swim” through sand.
Do the locomotion
A research group at the University of Würzburg has now translated the sandfish’s locomotion mechanism into a Mars rover that reportedly outperforms other models in moving across sand.
Image credit: Marco Schmidt/University of Würzburg
The team is led by Marco Schmidt, a university computer scientist and head of the Chair of Embedded Systems and Sensors for Earth Observation (ESSEO).
Collaborating with researchers from Bremen, the wheels imitate the animal’s characteristic interaction with the ground, generating both longitudinal and lateral forces. That movement leaves sinusoidal tracks in the sand.
Uneven terrain
Mars rovers must cope with sand, gravel, slopes, and generally uneven terrain while maintaining their mobility, stability, and efficiency.
“Conventional wheel designs are often optimized for low-speed travel and tend to slip, sink, or get stuck on soft ground,” says Amenosis Lopez, a researcher in Schmidt’s group.
The sandfish locomotion is adopted from Scincus scincus, a lizard living in the Sahara and able to burrow and then literally “swim” through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.
Image credit: BioDB
Control strategies
The work is ongoing, with further refinements predicted to improve performance on mixed terrain.
In addition to hardware development, the ESSEO team aims to expand its contribution to VaMEx towards software-driven mobility.
Plans are afoot to develop control strategies that explicitly take into account slippage, sinking and the interaction between terrain and wheel, thus enabling more stable and adaptable behavior of the rover in granular environments.
Scroll down to access a video clip of this robot. Go to:
https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/aktuelles/einblick/single/news/sandfisch-marsrover/
Also, go to “Rovers, crawlers & drones on #Mars – the Valles Marineris Explorer project” at:
Image credit: DLR
Posted in Space News
