By Bonnie James
QATAR’S chances to become the first country in the Middle East to host robotic rover experiments for planning Mars exploration have received a shot in the arm.
The sand dunes in the southern parts of the country have excellent potential as a site for development and testing of technology for robotic mobility, an expert told Gulf Times.
“Although there are many sandy deserts in the world and on Mars, Qatar offers the added advantage of accessible academic and technical infrastructure,” Dr David Wettergreen said in an e-mail from the US.
An associate research professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Dr Wettergreen had been on an exploratory visit of Qatar in March this year.
Dr Pascal Lee (co-founder and chairman of the Mars Institute, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute), accompanied Dr Wettergreen during the tour of Qatar’s deserts.
The researchers, who have worked together for many years on various projects, were inspired to visit Qatar by their friend and CMU in Qatar dean Dr Charles E Thorpe, a world-renowned robotics expert.
While in Qatar, the duo had told Gulf Times that the country has ‘the amazing and incredible combination of hi-tech academic facilities, infrastructure and proximity to the desert.’
Dr Wettergreen and Dr Lee had taken with them samples of Qatari desert sand to analyse geologically and look at the soil cohesion properties and investigate options of mobility.
“Most rover research to date has focused on stony deserts,” pointed out Dr Wettergreen.
Subsequent to the preliminary findings and observations, Dr Wettergreen has now said there are a number of important research issues to be pursued, with regard to rover development.
“This includes wheel design and traction, chasis configuration, sensing and control of slip/slide on slopes, and route planning and rover autonomy in sandy terrain,” he explained in the e-mail.
Dr Wettergreen, has presented the preliminary findings and is discussing with CMUQ how best to proceed.
“We will see if there is means to establish initial research in Qatar and then grow the activity and broaden involvement over time,” he said.
Dr Wettergreen has created robots and conducted investigations of challenging environments while developing the necessary ingredients of perception, planning, execution and control for robot autonomy.
He leads robotics research for the NASA investigation of life in the Atacama Desert of Chile, using the robotic rover Zoe and contributes to Mars rover technology developments.
Dr Lee, principal investigator of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, focuses his research on Mars.
Dr Wettergreen has done research and experimentation in autonomous long-range rover navigation and rough-terrain surface navigation.
Leading research in sun-synchronous navigation, he conducted field experiments well above the Arctic Circle on Devon Island in Canada, using ‘Hyperion’, a prototype circumnavigation robot developed by CMU.
Both the Atacama Desert and the Devon Island projects were among those that had Dr Wettergreen and Dr Lee working together.
Having worked in many Mars-like desert sites around the world, in particular in the Arctic and Antarctica, Dr Lee has been a participant in several Nasa solar system spacecraft exploration missions.
It was Dr Lee who initiated the Nasa-HMP in 1997 as a National Research Council post-doctoral research associate at Nasa Ames Research Center.
The Nasa-HMP is an international multi-disciplinary field research project centred on the scientific study of the Haughton impact structure and surrounding terrain, Devon Island, High Arctic, viewed as a Mars analogue site.
The HMP explores possible parallels and differences between the earth and Mars, and supports field studies of new technologies, strategies, and human factors in the preparation for the future exploration of both the Moon and Mars by robots and humans.