Douglas Isbell

Headquarters, Washington, DC August 5, 1997

(Phone: 202/358-1753)

John Bluck
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
(Phone: 650/604-5026)

Anne Watzman
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
(Phone: 412/268-3830)

RELEASE: 97-170

REMOTE CONTROL ROBOT BREAKS ROUGH TERRAIN TRAVEL

RECORD, PAVES
PATH FOR FUTURE PLANETARY SCIENCE MISSIONS

A hardy traveler named "Nomad" recently set a record by

traveling farther than any remotely controlled robot has before
over rough territory. The robot's four wheels logged more than
133 miles (215 kilometers) across Chile's rugged Atacama Desert
from June 15 to July 31, during a field experiment designed to
prepare for future missions to Antarctica, the Moon and Mars.

Scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field,

CA, and Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in
Pittsburgh performed experiments with Nomad for 45 days,
conducting both technology demonstrations and scientific
activities. Nomad often worked on its own to avoid obstacles and,
in a clear foreshadowing of the future duties of similar robots,
it recognized meteorites planted in the desert as a test and may
even have found a fossil.

"The Atacama trek is a quantum leap for the planetary

robotics culture, where the historical standard of travel has been
yards, not miles," said principal investigator
Dr. William L. "Red" Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon. "Although the
'straight-line' distance on a map was only about 13 miles, Nomad
had to weave through very difficult terrain, and it made numerous
sidetrips for science and to test the meteorite sensors. It is a
pioneer laying a trail toward future planetary robots, who will be
challenged for thousands of miles and years of operations, in bold
missions like searching for signs of life."
 The 1,600-pound robot, developed at Carnegie Mellon and
funded by NASA, validated the use of color stereo video cameras
with human-eye resolution for geology. A separate panospheric
camera returned more than a million video panoramas from the
Atacama, a cold, arid region located above 7,000 feet.

"During different phases of testing, we configured the robot

to simulate wide-area exploration of the Moon, the search for past
life on Mars and for the gathering of meteorite samples in the
Antarctic," said Dave Lavery, telerobotics program manager at NASA
Headquarters, Washington, DC. "Nomad met or exceeded all of our
objectives for this project."

"We want to give planetary scientists experience using mobile

robots, so that they can develop the skills necessary for
performing remotely guided investigations," added
Dr. David Wettergreen, Nomad project leader at Ames.

Nomad is about the size of a small car. To maneuver through

rough terrain, the robot has four-wheel drive and four-wheel
steering with a chassis that expands to improve stability and
travel over various terrain conditions. Four aluminum wheels with
cleats provide traction in soft sand. For this terrestrial
experiment, power was supplied by a gasoline generator that
enabled the robot to travel at speeds up to about one mile per
hour.

"Nomad drove itself through about 12 miles (20 kilometers) of

the 133 miles it traveled," said Dr. Mark Maimone, Nomad software
and navigation lead at Carnegie Mellon. "Autonomous driving is
critical for planetary exploration because the communications
delay between Earth and planets can be many minutes. With
autonomous driving, a robot can explore a much greater distance
because it doesn't have to wait for a person to decide a safe
route. The rover is able to see obstacles and recognize them on
its own," he said.

Nomad's unique onboard panospheric camera provided live 360-

degree, video-based still images of the robot's surroundings.
"Experimentation with the panospheric camera validated the use of
immersive imagery for remote driving," Maimone said.

The camera takes a 360-degree picture -- one frame per second

-- and did so throughout the mission. The high-resolution video
camera focuses up into a hemispheric mirror similar to a store
security mirror. The video view includes all of the ground up to
the horizon in the circle surrounding Nomad.

"The camera is a new technology, and it gave members of the

public as well as scientists a new way to drive with peripheral,
or side vision," he explained. "We sent the Nomad pictures to a
theater at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh that has a
200-degree, semi-circular screen. Fifty people at a time pushed a
button to vote on whether the robot should look to the left,
center or right."

On June 25, NASA scientists were driving the robot remotely

from their laboratory at Ames, more than 5,455 miles (8,780
kilometers) away, when the scientists in California found a rock
that appeared to contain algae fossils.

Using the rover's cameras, scientists noticed a light-

colored, three-inch diameter rock with a darker, intricately
shaped marking in a rock outcrop in the Chilean desert. The rock
was retrieved by Chilean scientists and was brought to Ames for
scientific analysis.

"The rock is sedimentary and was formed in an ancient sea

bed. However, the consensus is that this rock does not contain
fossilized algae," said Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, the expedition's NASA
science team leader. The science team was excited to learn that
the outcrop was an undiscovered geologic deposit from the Jurassic
Period.

"This experience is one of the most important of the science

tests," Cabrol said. "I am not sure that we can get much closer
to what may happen with the research of interesting rocks on Mars
and the related search for life in the coming Mars exploration
program. We are most likely to face this exact situation of
selecting a rock because it looks interesting to us. Once in the
lab, we were unable to tell conclusively if there had been life in
the rock at one time or not."

"The first-level interpretation from the rover camera was

close enough, fossil or not," she added. "The team was able to
reconstruct the geology of the site, often matching or at least
getting very close to the conclusions of the back-up field team."

The total cost of developing Nomad and conducting the desert

trek is $1.6 million. The project is funded by NASA with in-kind
support from corporate sponsors and educational foundations.

NASA and Carnegie Mellon are formulating plans to use Nomad

to look for meteorites in Antarctica in 1998 and 1999.

Further information about the Atacama desert trek, images and

data are available from the Ames Intelligent Mechanisms Group at
URL:

http://img.arc.nasa.gov/Nomad

Carnegie Mellon's Robotic's Institute also has a website at URL:

http://www.ri.cmu.edu/atacama-trek

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