Autonomous Robotic Meteorite Identification in Antarctica

• Main Authors: Liam Pedersen Michael, Michael Wagner, Dimitrios Apostolopoulos, William “red Whittaker
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2001
• Subjects: Elephant Moraine; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.21.4955; http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub2/pedersen_liam_2001_1/pedersen_liam_2001_1.pdf

This paper describes the development and implementation of a Bayes network based system for distinguishing terrestrial rocks from meteorites from onboard the mobile robotic rover Nomad. Equipped with a color camera and spectrometer, Nomad autonomously made the first robotic identification of a meteorite, in January 2000 at the Elephant Moraine, Antarctica. This paper discusses rock classification from a robotic platform and the challenges of autonomously obtaining good sensor data in the field, while focusing on Nomad implementation.