Graphics enhanced version of this site

A Sensor Arm for Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search
C. Urmson, B. Shamah, J. Teza, M.D. Wagner, D. Apostolopoulos, and W.L. Whittaker
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, Helsinki, Finland, July, 2001.

Jump to: Download | Abstract | Notes | Text Reference | BibTeX Reference

Adobe portable document format (pdf) [383 KB]

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

In January 2000 the Nomad robot searched an area of blue ice in Antarctica and autonomously classified 5 in-situ meteorites. The robotic capabilities of search and target identification, coupled with the scientific capabilities of analysis and classification of rocks in an extreme environment were made possible by the integration of many different technologies for both hardware and software. This paper focuses on the development and integration of the sensor arm used to deploy a spectrometer from a multi-meter scale robot to centimeter scale rocks. The sensor arm combines off the shelf hardware for motion control, actuation, and sensing. Available techniques were applied in the areas of kinematics, visual servoing and image segmentation. The successful demonstration of the robotic search for Antarctic meteorites serves as a benchmark for the advancement of both custom designed and off the shelf robotic technologies.

Sponsor: NASA

Associated centers: SRI and FRC
Associated project: Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search

C. Urmson, B. Shamah, J. Teza, M.D. Wagner, D. Apostolopoulos, and W.L. Whittaker, "A Sensor Arm for Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search," Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, Helsinki, Finland, July, 2001.

@inproceedings{Urmson_2001_3794,
   author = "Christopher Urmson and Benjamin Shamah and James Teza and Michael D Wagner and Dimitrios Apostolopoulos and William Red L. Whittaker",
   title = "A Sensor Arm for Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Field and Service Robotics",
   month = "July",
   year = "2001",
   address = "Helsinki, Finland"
}