A SMART robot called Nomad has joined the search for meteorites in eastern Antarctica. Nomad is roaming the ice as part of a NASA-funded project to develop autonomous robots that could explore the surfaces of other planets.
鈥淭his is not a case of a human sitting there operating the robot with a joystick,鈥� says Ralph Harvey, head of the Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites Program. 鈥淭he robot is doing the search itself, and making decisions on its own.鈥�
Nomad is fitted with cameras to help it navigate and estimate the distance to objects, a laser rangefinder to detect obstacles in its path, and a high-resolution camera to zoom in on interesting rocks. This registers the overall shape, size and colour of rocks it finds.
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If Nomad spots a promising candidate, it drives closer and uses mass spectrometry to calculate the probability that the rock is a meteorite. It then transmits the information back to its developers at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and to researchers on site who can confirm if Nomad has really found a meteorite.
About the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, Nomad has already trekked more than 200 kilometres through the Atacama Desert in Chile while remotely operated by researchers (快猫短视频, 16 August 1997, p 7). Now it is making its own decisions about how to explore and avoid obstacles.
Nomad learned its tricks from experience. 鈥淵ou have to train the robot,鈥� says project manager Dimitrios Apostolopoulos. Nomad was shown thousands of rocks that had been classified by their physical and chemical properties and its software learned to recognise them.
As a meteorite hunter, Nomad isn鈥檛 that great. Although it found one confirmed meteorite after just three days, a team of people could find more meteorites in a day than Nomad is likely to find in three weeks. Its value is in helping develop robots that could explore Mars and other planets. 鈥淚f you can take a robot and give it a catalogue of experience, you can open up the whole Solar System,鈥� says Harvey.