BigDog technology - A future place in planetary exploration?

[Kerbface]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog

Is it possible that further advanced versions of this technology might be used for future rovers to Mars and beyond? Good for exploring tricky terrain, and adapting automatically on the fly, but I'm sure there are some potential issues with it.

[Nibb31]

It's much heavier and more complex than wheels. Extra complexity and lack of redundancy are undesirable on something that nobody is going to be able to repair. If an actuator breaks on one of the legs, it can't move any more, and might even fall down and break some of the valuable equipment. If a wheel motor fails on Curiosity, there are several redundancy modes where the wheel can be disabled and the rover maintains mobility.

[Kerbface]

Those are good points, though of course in the future the technology may well get lighter and more failsafes could be implemented. I think it might be very useful for longer range rovers and be able to get places quicker. And because of it's intelligent motion, it would be able to navigate without human interaction, right itself when it falls and all that sort of thing, so you would have less risk of failure from those sorts of problems.

[Nibb31]

Sure, but for the moment wheels are simpler, and in space, simpler is always safer.

[softweir]

Not just simpler, but very much lighter. If they made Big Dog light enough to compete with wheels then it would become too fragile to operate safely.

The other problems are power consumption and CPU load. Wheels consume no power when parked and can go from active to stopped instantly, while Big Dog consumes significant amounts of power simply standing and takes a couple of seconds to sit down and power down. Rovers don't have tremendously powerful CPUs - they need radiation-hardened microchips which are significantly less powerful than equivalent terrestrial chips, and Big Dog needs a large, powerful processor to operate.

Yes, it is possible that some sort of walker technology will become as planet-rover capable as wheels are today, but in the meantime wheel technology will also advance, and walker technology will always be playing catch-up. So, all-in-all, I doubt that walking rovers will have much significant presence on other planets.

But I may be wrong - who knows?