PRISM Updates: Previous uses of robots in Antarctica

Speaker: Richard Stansbury, student, EECS, University of Kansas, 2002.

Modified Transcript: Two of the previous uses of robots that we have looked at have been Dante I and Nomad. Dante I was sent to Mt. Erebus in Antarctica. This area is quite different in many respects than the area where we plan to send our robot. At the same time, it gave us a good example of some of the temperature limitations that our robot faces. It also taught us that everything on the robot must be winterized. A simple fiber optic channel broke on Dante I, severing the communications relay, because it was not properly winterized.

Nomad was used as a surface traversing robot, so ours will be fairly similar. We hope that ours will be a little bit more independent and have more set courses, but theirs had similar properties to what we envision. Nomad had to navigate by GPS, and it had to traverse flat surfaces. Based on some of our observations of the limitations that they had, which sensors worked, and which ones didn't we can get a better idea of what sensors to put on our robot.