Categories: MarsScience

Future Designs: Robotic Mars Greenhouse, Teleporting Fridge

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Now THIS is what I’m talking about! Every year Electrolux holds a competition for students to design concepts for future appliances, and they’ve just announced the eight finalists. My favs: a robotic greenhouse for Mars and a teleporting refrigerator. Le Petit Prince (Little Prince) is a robotic greenhouse concept that is specially designed to help the future exploration and expanding population when we colonize Mars. This intelligent robot carries and cares for a plant inside its glass container, which is functionally mounted on a four-legged self-transporting pod. Not only does it search for the optimum place to receive enough sunlight and other nutrients, it also send reports of its movements and developments to its fellow greenhouse robots through wireless communication. It was designed by Martin Miklica, from the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic. He said he was inspired by the book The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov and R2-D2 from Star Wars (and surely Wall-E had something to do with this, too.)

See video of Le Petit Prince, below, and of the teleporting fridge.

This one I can’t wait for: The Teleport Fridge by Dulyawat Wongnawa, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Once we figure out how to beam things up, the Teleport Fridge teleports food, eliminating the time and distance a person has to travel to buy fresh groceries or products from a store or farm. Using touch-screen technology as the interface for the teleportation process, the Teleport Fridge simply teleports food to compartments in its refrigeration and freezer units. If the food spoils, it teleports it to the compost pile. Very cool, but it takes the adventure out of opening those containers in the back of the fridge.

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See the other six design concepts and vote for your favorite here.

Source: Electrolux Design Lab

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

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