<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Robots have it rough up here at 10,580 feet on the Greenland ice sheet, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The cold drains batteries. The human handlers push hard because their research season is measured in mere weeks. And for Yeti, which arrived here at Summit Station in the back of an LC-130H on July 15, life is destined to be dangerous. It&amp;#039;s an autonomous robot whose main job will be to roll out ahead of heavy machinery, and use ground-penetrating radar to scout for dangerous crevasses in the ice.  Within two years, similar robots may deploy on lonely, cold missions to collect data for scientists to analyze from a distance. The Dartmouth team behind Yeti, led by engineering professor Laura Ray, has designed software to help the robot and a solar-powered cousin called Cool Robot work as versatile mules for varied sensor packages. Along with collaborators at the University of New Hampshire and the Army&amp;#039;s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, the Dartmouth team envisions fleets of robots one day replacing many human field researchers. But today, PM is along at the start of an eight-day mission with more modest goals: Enable a pair of engineers to identify and fix problems, collect particulate matter in a plume of exhaust from the station generators and machinery, and precisely measure the height of tiny ridges in the snow called sastrugi.       Tom Lane and Suk Joon Lee, two engineering students at Dartmouth, unload Yeti from its crate within a couple of hours of landing at Summit Station, a research facility run by the National Science Foundation. Yeti is a handsome, knee-high set of glass-topped boxes angled to form a shallow A-frame, with a white antenna and widely spaced, oversize wheels. (The polar snow surface is so hard that tracks are unnecessary, and wheels are more efficient.) Lane and Lee roll it out of the cavernous shop they&amp;#039;ll be calling home during the test. Lee slings a control rig over his neck; it carries an IBM ThinkPad laptop positioned for typing and a white radio antenna. The interface, designed in the MATLAB computing language, allows a scientist to choose a pattern for Yeti to follow, and then input a series of GPS coordinates where the robot should turn. The researcher can also direct the robot to stop for sampling at regular intervals or at precise locations along the way.  Lee fires Yeti up and starts transmitting patterns for the robot to follow. It takes off at a fast clip. The articulating body absorbs bumps and dips, and the whole package looks unstoppable. Lane runs after it, trying to scurry into striking distance as it zig-zags through its paces. &amp;quot;If it does decide to go crazy I can hit the switch and turn off the motors,&amp;quot; Lane says between tests.  Yeti is a bright student: It runs through its grid patterns, more or less hitting its GPS points. Lane is panting in the thin air, but Yeti seems positively jaunty on the crisp snow, showing off for the Dartmouth team and a reporter. Afternoon turns into a clear, sunny night on the ice sheet, and testing becomes more complex. Now, Yeti starts to stumble. The robot is designed to make round turns, like a car, and then return to a straight line. However, rather than quickly getting back on track, it oscillates along the path. When Yeti stops, it skids into a 180-degree turn, which looks like a charming audition for a car-drifting video, but is decidedly not the design spec. Once or twice, some of the six 2-lb batteries shake loose from their connections. Lee continually adjusts coefficients in the Proportional Integral Differential equations that control the motors, working to get the robot to turn as close to its designated waypoints as possible.  Later that night, Lane says, &amp;quot;We may have a Mars rover problem.&amp;quot; (In a famously embarrassing episode in 1999, it turned out that one set of programmers had employed English units on a Mars orbiter, while another used metric units. The spacecraft crashed.) Lee has designated &amp;quot;west&amp;quot; as a positive number in his code and &amp;quot;east&amp;quot; as negative; Lane wrote his code the opposite way. The fix is simple but tedious: Lane will have to comb through his programming to make the changes by hand. (GPS controls become messy as longitude lines converge near the poles. Lane shows me screen after screen of code he wrote to help direct the robot; it resembles the bad dream a trigonometry student might have before an exam.) By the time they leave the ice sheet, the students hope to send Yeti on excursions of up to 10 km (6.2 miles) and to fine-tune its GPS controls to the millimeter, or at least centimeter, range.  In harsh environments, the age of the robots is already here: Rovers have conducted undersea observations at the edge of the ice in Antarctica and explored Mars, while UAVs and ground robots have deployed to war zones. Most of these are expensive, purpose-built machines. What Dartmouth engineers aim to do is pioneer a robot that eventually costs $20,000 to build and can transport nearly any package of instrumentation. In 2013, Yeti&amp;#039;s solar-powered cousin called Cool Robot is scheduled to undertake a long solo traverse of Greenland to gather atmospheric chemistry data, conduct GPS-based elevation surveys and perhaps to validate data collected by satellites. Yeti may return to the icy island to scout for crevasses on the annual 700-mile-long expedition that brings supplies to Summit Station each spring. If these robots and their progeny work as planned, some human researchers will have to hang up their mukluks. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a6742/yeti-and-cool-robot-the-rovers-tough-enough-to-explore-greenlands-ice-sheet/>