Swarming Spherical Robot Hedgehogs to Explore Space

Swarming robots both of fiction and fact are very common. One more swarm from Stanford University, working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, deployed from a coffee table sized mother carft will do space exploration in low gravity asteroids and small moons.
These small (half meter diameter spheres) with hedgehog spines in the place of wheels have three flywheels oriented in each axis. These highly manoeuvrable agile robots can study the environment with a variety of instruments on moons and asteroids of low gravity where wheels are of little use.

#-Link-Snipped-#