Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System (WORMS) refers to an architecture where a robotic mobility capability to access extreme lunar terrain emerges from the swarm-like integration of a small (‘oligomeric’) set of nearly-identical, articulating ‘worms’.

Mar 14, 2023 · The Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System, or WORMS, is a reconfigurable, modular, multiagent robotics architecture for extreme lunar terrain mobility developed by MIT’s Space Resources Workshop for NASA’s 2022 BIG Idea Challenge.

Mar 29, 2022 · WORMS is a modular architecture where the robotic mobility capability to access extreme lunar terrain emerges from the swarm-like integration of a small (“oligomeric”) set of nearly-identical, articulating “worms.”

Aug 23, 2023 · An MIT team has produced an atlas of how most cells, and the circuits they take part in, encode a worm's actions. The atlas reveals the underlying “logic” of how an animal brain produces a sophisticated and flexible repertoire of behaviors, even as its environmental circumstances change.

Dec 14, 2022 · WORMS shown here on a rendering of a future lunar settlement. An interdisciplinary MIT team received the “Best Technical Paper” award at the 2022 NASA BIG Idea Challenge forum in November for their demonstration of a proof-of-concept of a novel platform architecture for reconfigurable lunar robots.

Jan 21, 2025 · MIT Associate Professor Steven Flavell uses the worm C. elegans as a model to study behaviors such as feeding and navigation, in hopes of shedding light on how these behaviors are controlled in other animals, including humans.

Aug 23, 2023 · MIT researchers model and create an atlas for how neurons of the worm C. elegans encode its behaviors, make findings available on their “WormWideWeb.”

The MIT WORMS team seeks to explore the applications of modular robotics to space exploration. The team’s reconfigurable robot was built as a part of NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge, with the goal of preventing a “zoo” of specialized robots on the moon.

OpenWorm is an open source project dedicated to creating a virtual C. elegans nematode in a computer.

MIT engineers design a mix-and-match kit for building lunar exploration robots called WORMS (Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System). WORMS aims to prevent a “zoo of machines” by allowing astronauts to easily reconfigure robots for various tasks on the moon.