Yeti: Robot for Autonomous GPR Survey over Polar Terrain

Via this NASA-funded project, engineering students at Dartmouth College have designed and are building a robot, named “Yeti,” to conduct autonomous surveys using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to detect sub-surface crevasses under polar snowfields. Such GPR surveys are essential to ensure the safety of over-snow traverses in Antarctica and Greenland and are currently conducted with GPR mounted to the lead manned vehicle. Yeti could improve safety, decrease costs, and increase survey coverage compared with current practice. The student team works under the supervision of roboticist Prof. Laura Ray, and the project is funded through an educational grant from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Steve Arcone, radar expert at the Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), initiated the project and posed the design requirements. Dr. Jim Lever, a CRREL engineer with over-snow mobility and robotics expertise, assisted with the design when he was on sabbatical at Dartmouth. The 70-kg four-wheel-drive robot is designed to tow a portable GPR unit more than 10 km over rough snowfields in less than 2 hours on a single battery charge. It will automatically return to the base camp after completing a survey. Yeti will navigate autonomously using GPS waypoint following, and will synchronize the recorded GPR and GPS data for later human analysis to detect crevasses. The robot can also be controlled manually using a radio and laptop interface. GSSI, a commercial developer of GPR, has donated a radar system to the team for field tests and has expressed interest in producing the robot if the prototype performs well. The team will complete assembly and local testing of Yeti by March 2008.