NASA's Polar Rover Passes Latest Test With Some Difficulty

NASA has a new rover but this time it's destination, though at times as other-worldly as Mars, is much more local. Named GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, the robot is headed for the polar regions.

Grover has been under development for years, having been designed by teams of students attending engineering boot camps at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2010 and 2011. Built to carry a ground-penetrating radar to analyze layers of snow and ice, the rover has been in the care of Boise State University most recently for some NASA-funded "fine tuning," according to a press release.

And while researchers have tested GROVER in a variety of locations, including a beach in Maryland and the snow in Idaho, the most recent test that took place at Summit Camp, the highest point in Greenland, represented the rover's first polar experience.

Among the exercise's main goals was proving that the robot could execute commands sent from afar over an Iridiuim satellite - a task it proved successful in.

"When we saw it moving and travelling to the locations our professor had keyed in from Boise, we knew all of our hard work had paid off," said Gabriel Trisca, a graduate student from Boise State University who has been involved in the GROVER project from its start. "GROVER has grown to be a fully-autonomous, GPS-guided and satellite-linked platform for scientific research."

Over the five-week period, Grover collected and stored radar data over 18 miles, during which period it was also able to transmit information in real time how its onboard systems were performing. The robot's solar-charged batteries, meanwhile, allowed it to operate for up to 12 hours before having to recharge.

"When you work at the poles, on the ice, it's cold, it's tiring, it's expensive and there's a limit to how much ground you can cover on snowmobiles," said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It would be great if autonomous robotic platforms could do part of this work - especially the part where high winds and blowing snow try to freeze your skin."

Unfortunately, however, despite the hope that the 800-pound robot would be able to work around the clock and thus cover more ground, the extreme conditions took a toll on its electronics, battery consumption and mobility, though the scientists report that they aren't necessarily surprised by this.

"This is very common the first time you take an instrument into an environment like Greenland," said Hans-Peter Marshall, a geoscientist at Boise State University and science adviser on the project. "It's always more challenging than you thought it was going to be: batteries don't recharge as fast and they don't last as long, and it takes computers and instrumentation longer to boot."

However, the difficulties didn't stop there as the scientists were forced to repeatedly tinker with the rover's speed and the power sent to each of its two autonomous tracks so that GROVER wouldn't get stuck in the snow.

Going forward, Koenig said, the ideal would be to have a fleet of robots collecting data regarding ice melt and other important insights into the on-goings of the world's most extreme locales.

"One thing I can imagine is having a big robot like GROVER with several smaller ones that can move radially outwards to increase the swath GROVER would cover," Marshall said. "Also, we've been thinking about bringing back smaller platforms to a larger one to recharge."

Koenig agreed, saying: "An army of polar robots - that would be neat."