A graphic look at rover distances traveled on extra-earth objects.

abcstarstuff:

NINE-YEAR-OLD MARS ROVER PASSES 40-YEAR-OLD RECORD

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth’s Moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission’s Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.21 statute miles or 35.74 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday.

The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars today that the rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Thursday, bringing Opportunity’s total odometry since landing on Mars in January 2004 to 22.22 statute miles (35.76 kilometers).

Cernan discussed this prospect a few days ago with Opportunity team member Jim Rice of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The Apollo 17 astronaut said, “The record we established with a roving vehicle was made to be broken, and I’m excited and proud to be able to pass the torch to Opportunity.”

The international record for driving distance on another world is still held by the Soviet Union’s remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the surface of Earth’s Moon in 1973.

Opportunity began a multi-week trek this week from an area where it has been working since mid-2011, the “Cape York” segment of the rim of Endeavor Crater, to an area about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) away, “Solander Point.”

Rovers are not just for exploring distant planets. Here is a NASA rover exploring Greenland.

abcstarstuff:

NASA Rover Prototype Set to Explore Greenland Ice Sheet
NASA’s newest scientific rover is set for testing May 3 through June 8 in the highest part of Greenland.

The robot known as GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, will roam the frigid landscape collecting measurements to help scientists better understand changes in the massive ice sheet.
This autonomous, solar-powered robot carries a ground-penetrating radar to study how snow accumulates, adding layer upon layer to the ice sheet over time.

Greenland’s surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., expect GROVER to detect the layer of the ice sheet that formed in the aftermath of that extreme melt event.

Research with polar rovers costs less than aircraft or satellites, the usual platforms.

“Robots like GROVER will give us a new tool for glaciology studies,” said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at Goddard and science advisor on the project.

GROVER will be joined on the ice sheet in June by another robot, named Cool Robot, developed at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., with funding from the National Science Foundation. This rover can tow a variety of instrument packages to conduct glaciological and atmospheric sampling studies.

GROVER was developed in 2010 and 2011 by teams of students participating in summer engineering boot camps at Goddard. The students were interested in building a rover and approached Koenig about whether a rover could aid her studies of snow accumulation on ice sheets. This information typically is gathered by radars carried on snowmobiles and airplanes. Koenig suggested putting a radar on a rover for this work.

Koenig, now a science advisor on the GROVER Project, asked Hans-Peter Marshall, a glaciologist at Boise State University to bring in his expertise in small, low-power, autonomous radars that could be mounted on GROVER. Since its inception at the boot camp, GROVER has been fine-tuned, with NASA funding, at Boise State.

The tank-like GROVER prototype stands six feet tall, including its solar panels. It weighs about 800 pounds and traverses the ice on two repurposed snowmobile tracks. The robot is powered entirely by solar energy, so it can operate in pristine polar environments without adding to air pollution. The panels are mounted in an inverted V, allowing them to collect energy from the sun and sunlight reflected off the ice sheet.

A ground-penetrating radar powered by two rechargeable batteries rests on the back of the rover. The radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.

From a research station operated by the National Science Foundation called Summit Camp, a spot where the ice sheet is about 2 miles thick, GROVER will crawl at an average speed of 1.2 mph (2 kilometers per hour). Because the sun never dips below the horizon during the Arctic summer, GROVER can work at any time during the day and should be able to work longer and gather more data than a human on a snowmobile.

At the beginning of the summit tests, Koenig’s team will keep GROVER close to camp and communicate with it via Wi-Fi within a three-mile (4.8-kilometer) range. GROVER will transmit snippets of data during the trial to ensure it is working properly but the majority of data will be recovered at the end of the season. The researchers eventually will switch to satellite communications, which will allow the robot to roam farther and transmit data in real time. Ideally, researchers will be able to drive the rover from their desks.

“We think it’s really powerful,” said Gabriel Trisca, a Boise State master’s degree student who developed GROVER’s software. “The fact is the robot could be anywhere in the world and we’ll be able to control it from anywhere.”

Michael Comberiate, a retired NASA engineer and manager of Goddard’s Engineering Boot Camp said the Earth-bound Greenland Rover is similar to NASA missions off the planet.

“GROVER is just like a spacecraft but it has to operate on the ground,” Comberiate said. “It has to survive unattended for months in a hostile environment, with just a few commands to interrogate it and find out its status and give it some directions for how to accommodate situations it finds itself in.”

Koenig hopes more radar data will help shed light on Greenland’s snow accumulation. Scientists compare annual accumulation to the volume of ice lost to sea each year to calculate the ice sheet’s overall mass balance and its contribution to sea level rise.

A look at efforts to help train Robonaut.

ikenbot:

NASA Wants You to Train Its Space Robot

Astronauts on board the International Space Station don’t have a lot of free time, which means the last thing they want to do is expend energy on mundane chores like vacuuming. Enter Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot in space that takes on these everyday tasks.

R2, which has been on the ISS since 2011, has a mission: clean handrails, vacuum air filters and take air-flow measurements. The problem is it doesn’t yet have the ability to learn and complete the work. So NASA is looking for someone to teach the bot. The Robonaut Challenge calls on contestants to write algorithms that allow R2 to interact with a training dashboard the space agency built.

“R2 is meant to contribute back to the ISS by freeing the astronauts up to do more scientific research and the more difficult tasks,” Allison Thackston of the Robonaut team tells Mashable via email. “We measure our cost savings in crew hours saved, which translates into more important scientific and engineering research being done.”

Competitors will start by writing code that enables R2 to “see” and recognize the state and location of LED-illuminated buttons and switches on the dashboard. Building on that successful algorithm, contestants will write control software that manipulates the objects that Robonaut can recognize and locate.

The contest started on Monday morning and will run for three weeks. However, the Robonaut team says it won’t take long for solutions to start trickling in.

“While there is no requirement for contestants to submit their solutions early, we usually begin seeing the first solutions within a week of launch,” says Robonaut’s Julia Badger.

NASA may eventually use the Robonaut 2 to prepare or clean up work sites for astronauts outside the ISS. However, as sophisticated as the technology is, R2 won’t likely replace humans in space.

“Robotics technology has a long way to go,” says Badger. “But having a robotic assistant is a great way to push that technology while still having the benefit of human interaction and supervisory control.”

NASA is hosting its Robonaut Challenge with TopCoder, the world’s largest open platform for the computer science community.

(via niceskynewworld)

A look at another great piece of robotics from Festo.

prostheticknowledge:

BionicOpter 

Remote-controlled drone that flies and is in the form of a dragonfly - video embedded below:

With the BionicOpter, Festo has technically mastered the highly complex flight characteristics of the dragonfly. Just like its model in nature, this ultralight flying object can fly in all directions, hover in mid-air and glide without beating its wings.

More Here

(via electricspacekoolaid)

NASAs plans for 3D printing with robots.

personalfactory:

NASA wants to 3D print lunar base too, with giant spider robots

“Last month, the European Space Agency (ESA) was teaming up with its industrial partner renowned architects Foster + Partners to test the feasibility of 3D printing using lunar soil and to build a lunar base.

It seems that NASA has also got a similar idea: using existing resources on the moon to build those structures. Space architects Tomas Rousek, Katarina Eriksson and Dr. Ondrej Doule have unveiled their vision for a lunar module which shows the potential of 3D printing technology from NASA.” ~ 3ders.org