The “SnoMote Remote Controlled Weather Station”
At first, I though this must be a joke. But, it is not. They call it “an autonomous robot designed by Georgia Tech to gather scientific data in ice environments.” It started life as the Ski-Doo® RC Snowmobile which is 28″ long, and runs for 30 minutes on a charge.
But in a press release from Georgia Tech on May 27th, seen below, it is clear that this is real, true, fully federally funded NASA science project. You can buy one here from Hammacher Schlemmer for $79.95 Ooops, sold out, looks like Georgia Tech bought them out.
My question is, when one of these gets stuck in a crack or crevasse, or simply runs out of power prematurely, do they just leave it there for the polar bears to play with or do they send the lowliest science intern out on the ice to fetch it back, lest it remain to pollute the sea and/or sea ice with it’s Lead or Nickel Cadmium rechargeable batteries?
UAV’s have already been used in the arctic.
Robots go where scientists fear to tread
 SnoMote, an autonomous robot designed by Georgia Tech to gather scientific data in ice environments. Click here for more information. |
ATLANTA ( May 27, 2008 ) — Scientists are diligently working to understand how and why the world’s ice shelves are melting. While most of the data they need (temperatures, wind speed, humidity, radiation) can be obtained by satellite, it isn’t as accurate as good old-fashioned, on-site measurement and static ground-based weather stations don’t allow scientists to collect info from as many locations as they’d like.
And unfortunately, the locations in question are volatile ice sheets, possibly cracking, shifting and filling with water — not exactly a safe environment for scientists.
To help scientists collect the more detailed data they need without risking scientists’ safety, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Pennsylvania State University, have created specially designed robots called SnoMotes to traverse these potentially dangerous ice environments. The SnoMotes work as a team, autonomously collaborating among themselves to cover all the necessary ground to gather assigned scientific measurements. Data gathered by the Snomotes could give scientists a better understanding of the important dynamics that influence the stability of ice sheets.
 Ayanna Howard, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, with a SnoMote, a robot designed to gather scientific data in ice environments. Click here for more information. |
“In order to say with certainty how climate change affects the world’s ice, scientists need accurate data points to validate their climate models,” said Ayanna Howard, lead on the project and an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. “Our goal was to create rovers that could gather more accurate data to help scientists create better climate models. It’s definitely science-driven robotics.”
Howard unveiled the SnoMotes at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Pasadena on May 23. The SnoMotes will also be part of an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in June. The research was funded by a grant from NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program.
Howard, who previously worked with rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is working with Magnus Egerstedt, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Derrick Lampkin, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State who studies ice sheets and how changes in climate contribute to changes in these large ice masses. Lampkin currently takes ice sheet measurements with satellite data and ground-based weather stations, but would prefer to use the more accurate data possible with the simultaneous ground measurements that efficient rovers can provide. Read the rest of this entry »
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