Robots in the Planetary Cold

Robots in the Planetary Cold
Presented by Red Whittaker
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute

Robots are suitable for explorering challenging places from Earth's Antarctic regions to the extreme environments of the Moon and Mercury or even deadly places that humans dare not go such as the damaged Chernobyl nuclear plant in Russia.

The main emphasis of the presentation was on autonomously controlled, sun-synchronous robots that are continuously operated by solar power. These are practical on slowly rotating bodies such as the Moon (28 days rotation) and Mercury (187 days) or on bodies with a tilted axis that allow continuous sunshine at polar regions during summer, such as Earth and Mars. Issues impacting sun synchrony are shown in the charts reproduced below. For more information about sun-synchronous robotic exploration, see the Robotics Institute Sunsync web site