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June 12, 2007
Watch a movie of robot deploying (click the above image to download; requires Windows Media Player) |
In September, Assistant Professor Derrick Lampkin received a received a NASA AIST (Advanced Information Systems Technology) Grant. The three-year developmental grant is aimed to design mobile rovers (serving as data collectors) for use in harsh, Antarctic climates. Below, Derrick reports on the project's progress.
Continental Ice Sheets such as Antarctica and Greenland play a major role in the stability of Earth's climate. These large ice masses are sensitive to changes in global temperatures and have an impact of planetary radiation balance, climate, and sea level. Investigating spatio-temporal variations of ice shelf surface energy balance at moderate scales ranging between tens of meters to kilometers would greatly enhance detection and long-term monitoring of the onset, duration, and magnitude of vigorous melt dynamics. Currently, automatic weather station (AWS) units are deployed in remote regions throughout Greenland and Antarctica. AWS units measure air temperature, wind speed and direction, air pressure, relative humidity. By developing a distributed network of mobile, autonomous wireless robotic rover capable of measuring micrometeorological data could be provided at adaptive moderate spatial scales to augment the existing AWS network. Such a network would greatly improve our capacity as ice sheet scientists to assess the stability of these vital structures.
Our group, supported under NASA's Advanced Information Technology (AIST) program, has developed the rover's Instrument Package and Deployment (IPD) assembly (Figure 1a, b). This assembly is a vital component of the rover's capacity. The IPD allows the standard meteorological instruments that measure net radiation, wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, and atmospheric barometric pressure to be deployed at an appropriate height above the ice sheet surface with full retraction in a stowed configuration while the rover is in motion. The IPD assembly will be mounted to a tracked mobile platform (Figure 2). The next phase of our project will work on mounting the IPD to the track system and integrating the rover's power and data management components. The video demonstrates how the IPD unit operates. The IPD development team is composed of a group of mechanical engineering students who worked on the construction of the unit as their senior design project through Penn State's Learning Laboratory. Team personnel include Jason Allshouse (Team Leader), Nicholas Mercurio (Team Sponsor Liason), Peter Spollen (Team Manager), and David Santarelli (Team Archiver). Their excellent work resulted in the group winning first place in the annual senior design competition. Congratulations to the team and their hard work!
 Figure 1a: IPD in retracted mode with IPD development team. 1 |
 Figure 1b: IPD in deployed mode. |
 Figure 2: Tracked rover platform (image depicts The Machine Lab Company, MMP-40 platform product). |
