UWRover: A Low-Cost, Autonomous, Solar-Powered, Modular Polar Rover for Radar Survey Applications
Abstract
Remoteness and objective hazard posed by severe weather and crevasses fundamentally prohibit ground-based field teams from sampling some of the most interesting and dynamic regions of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. To extend ground-based sampling capabilities and make polar fieldwork safer and more cost effective, we have designed a solar-powered modular autonomous rover capable of towing 100kg of instrument payload across the ice sheet surface. Here we present the design considerations and preliminary mechanical characteristics of our modular rover platform. Because of our group's particular interests linking surface processes with imaged subsurface structure, the discussion of the rover's capabilities focus on ice penetrating radar applications, but a range of diverse survey applications is made possible by the designed system modularity, including the meteorological measurements and near surface isotope sampling. The rover can be assembled as a single high-powered unit or decoupled into two smaller independent, but radio-linked two-wheel rover platforms. A miniaturized high-frequency (HF;10-100 MHz) radar system for linked surface-subsurface ice sheet analyses can be pulled in series behind the large rover or individually by the decoupled rovers, enabling data acquisition in both s- and p- radar polarizations . Utilizing live processing capabilities of the rover we hope to automate future surveys and adaptively densify grids based on rover real-time processing bed traces of identified features of interest. We plan to release full design schematics and operating code for our rover so that others may use it for their own applications.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMNS11B0640P
- Keywords:
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- 0702 Permafrost;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0738 Ice;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0758 Remote sensing;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0794 Instruments and techniques;
- CRYOSPHERE