Unmanned Systems Mission Critical - Winter 2011

Mission CritiCal • Winter 2011 1

VOLUME1 NO.4 • WINTER 2011 • AUVSI • 2700 Sou th Qu in cy S t ree t , Su i t e 400 , A r l i ng ton , VA 22206 , USA

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RobotsstudytheoceanUnmannedsystemsonMarsSearchingforGenghisKhan

Exploration

Promoting and Supporting Unmanned Systems and Robotics

Across the Globe

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4 Essential components

The latest in exploration robotics

VOLUME1 NO.4 • WINTER 2011

7 Sea spanWith funding help from the National Science Foundation, ocean communications and monitoring are spanning broader horizons through the Ocean Observatories Initiative

14 Cooler than coolDartmouth researchers, and their robots, battle the elements to gather data in Greenland

Page 7

12 State of the art Exploration robots’ work spans not only the globe, but the solar system

On the cover:Dartmouth’s Yeti robot traverses the abomi-nable terrain on a 2010 mission in Antarc-tica. To see how the university’s team fared in a recent trip to Greenland with Yeti, see the story on Page 14. Photo courtesy Eric M. Trautmann, Laura Ray, Dartmouth University.

CONTENTS

18 Q & A A leading expert discusses NASA’s

research using Global Hawk

28 Timeline A history of gliders

Page 14

2 Mission CritiCal • Winter 2011

Mission Critical is published four times a year as an official publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Contents of the articles are the sole opinions of the authors and do not necessarily express the policies or opinion of the publisher, editor, AUVSI or any entity of the U.S. government. Materials may not be reproduced without written permission. All advertising will be subject to publisher’s approval and advertisers will agree to indemnify and relieve publisher of loss or claims resulting from advertising contents. Annual subscription and back issue/reprint requests may be addressed to AUVSI. Mission Critical is provided with AUVSI membership.

The Martian chroniclerNASA’s Curiosity rover is headed to the Red Planet and is set to be the biggest, most capable planet-roving robot to date

26 Market ReportThe market potential of ROVs and AUVs

36 Uncanny valleyUAVs face bureaucratic and societal challenges

38 Testing, testingNASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

preps robots for outerspace

40 Pop culture cornerPopular media’s take on exploration robots

42 Technology gapUnderwater robots communications challenges

44 End usersResearching underwater volcanoes with ROVs

Page 21

Page 30

Search for a lost empireA team of researchers from the University of California San Diego use unmanned aerial vehicles to search for the tomb of Genghis Khan


Editorial

VicePresidentofCommunications andPublications,Editor

Brett [email protected]

ManagingEditorDanielle Lucey

[email protected]

AssociateEditorStephanie [email protected]

ContributingWriterLindsay Voss

[email protected]

AdvertisingSeniorAdvertising

andMarketingManagerLisa Fick

[email protected]+1 571 255 7779

A publication of

PresidentandCEOMichael Toscano

ExecutiveVicePresidentGretchen West

AUVSIHeadquarters2700 South Quincy Street, Suite 400

Arlington, VA 22206 USA+1 703 845 9671

[email protected]

Welcome to the fourth edition of AU-VSI’s new quarterly electronic publi-cation, Mission Critical.

This issue focuses on one area where un-manned systems and robots can really show their stuff: exploration. Going where no man has gone before, to paraphrase from Star Trek, and going to places where — in some cases — no man can go at all.

Like, for instance, to Mars. While astro-nauts will no doubt trod the surface of the Red Planet at some point, that event is still many years away. The distances are too long, the conditions too extreme, to allow for manned exploration right away. But ro-bots can make that move now, and NASA is sending its largest rover yet to Mars. The Curiosity rover is part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. It’s “not your father’s rover,” as the program’s deputy scientist says, standing 6 feet tall and weighing al-most a ton.

Curiosity is supposed to land on Mars in early August and performs its mission for one Martian year, or 768 Earth days. If the previous Spirit and Opportunity rovers are any guide, its mission should extend well beyond that. Its story begins on Page 21.

While everyone is familiar with oceans, much about how they work is still mysteri-ous. Ocean environments and conditions move and can cause ecological change over long distances, such as low-oxygen conditions that form in one area and then kill fish thousands of miles away. Unmanned systems will help chart such changes as part of the ambitious Ocean Observatories Initiative, a government-academia-industry program funded by the National Science

Foundation that is placing large observa-tion areas at key ocean spots around the world.

Two of the system’s arrays will be located off the east and west coasts of North Amer-ica, while smaller stations will extend as far as near the tip of South America. The OOI will incorporate unmanned systems, in the form of gliders and powered autonomous underwater vehicles, to make moving mea-surements that will go along with monitor-ing from buoys, seafloor moorings and powered water column profilers that move up and down on cables.

The OOI is expected to provide a continu-ous stream of data, for up to three decades, against which various short-term experi-ments can be run. It’s also intended to put data in the hands of anyone who wants it, accessible by only the click of a mouse. The tale of the OOI begins on Page 7.

As you’ll see throughout the rest of the issue, robots are also going other places, includ-ing searching for the burial place of Geng-his Khan, where a high-tech unmanned he-licopter could help solve a millennium-old mystery (see Page 30); Greenland and Antarctica (see Page 14); and they’re even trying to set records (see the Liquid Robotics story on Page 4).

Upcoming issues of Mission Critical will focus on agriculture, commercial robotics, sensors and security. We hope you’re en-joying the journey.

Editor’s message

Brett Davis


Essential Components

A Wave Glider, outfitted with an acoustic Doppler current profiler, measure currents off the coast of California. Liquid Robotics is sending a fleet of these vessels on the longest ever unmanned ocean journey. Photo courtesy Liquid Robotics.

WPI robotics engineering majors working on their project Photo courtesy Patrick O’Connor, WPI.

Liquid Robotics attempts world-record Pacific runLiquid Robotics of Sunnyvale, Calif., has launched four of its Wave Glider ocean robots off the coast of California on what may become a record-setting journey across the Pacific Ocean. This trip, if completed, would be the longest distance ever attempted by an unmanned ocean vessel.

The purpose of this voyage, called the PacX for Pacific Crossing, is to “foster new sci-entific discoveries in ocean science by making available vast amounts of ocean data collected and transmitted globally during the Wave Gliders’ yearlong journey,” accord-ing to a company press release.

Liquid Robotics and Google Earth’s ocean capability are providing a platform for the world to follow the expedition virtually, while Virgin Oceanic and Liquid Robotics will jointly explore the Mariana Trench.

The gliders are expected to take more than 300 days to complete their voyage, all the while transmitting ocean data on salinity, water temperature, waves, weather, fluores-cence and dissolved oxygen.

If the Wave Gliders reach their destination, it will be recorded as a Guinness World Record for the longest voyage completed by an unmanned ocean vessel.

“Imagine the possible applications and discoveries this data will enable for the scientific community,” says Bill Vass, CEO of Liquid Robotics. “Liquid Robotics has made this in-vestment in the PacX Challenge to not only demonstrate the endurance of Wave Gliders, but more importantly, to ignite everyone’s imagination on what can be discovered and explored when the ocean is networked with sensors. I encourage everyone who has a passion for the ocean to participate in our journey.”

NASA challenge mirrors space needsNASA and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts are seeking teams to compete in a robot technology demonstra-tion competition with a potential $1.5 million prize.

During the Sample Return Robot Challenge, teams will compete to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from a wide and varied terrain without human control. The objective of the competition is to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies. In-novations stemming from this challenge may improve NASA’s capability to explore a variety of destinations in space, as well

To follow the Wave Gliders via Google Earth to or access the Wave Glider data, visit the Liquid Robotics PacX website

http://liquidr.com/pacx


Essential Components

as enhance the nation’s robotic technology for use in industries and applications on Earth.

“NASA’s Centennial Challenges competi-tions engage teams from across the coun-try to solve the technology hurdles NASA faces as we explore new frontiers,” says Mike Gazarik, director of NASA’s Space Technology Program in Washington, D.C. “We’re looking forward to teams register-ing to compete so they can unleash their creative problem-solvers to take on this ro-botic technology challenge.”

NASA provides the prize money to the win-ning team as part of the agency’s Centen-nial Challenges competitions, which seek unconventional solutions to problems of in-terest to the agency and the nation. While NASA provides the prize purse, the com-petitions are managed by nonprofit orga-nizations that cover the cost of operations through commercial or private sponsor-ships. The competition will take place from 15-18 June in Worcester, Mass., and the or-ganizations anticipate attracting hundreds of competitors from industry and academia nationwide.

“WPI takes tremendous pride in being the first university selected by NASA as a partner for a Centennial Challenge,” says WPI President and CEO Dennis D. Berkey. “This university is a hub of expertise and innovation within the area of robotics, and like NASA, we believe strongly in the prom-ise of this industry. Accordingly, we have invested deeply in growing our programs and growing interest in the field among young people. We are looking forward to an exciting competition.”

There have been 21 NASA Centennial Challenges competitions since 2005. Through this program, NASA has awarded $4.5 million to 13 different challenge-win-ning teams.

Competitors will not be allowed to test their robots once on site at the competition.

ROV uncovers deep-sea lifeResearchers at Oxford University in Eng-land are using an ROV to conduct the first known exploration of hydrothermal vents, smoke-like plumes of chemical-rich seawa-ter reacting to a dramatic change in tem-perature, in the East Scotia Ridge of the South Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica. Isis, an ROV developed by the U.K.’s National Oceanography Centre that’s the size of a four-wheel-drive car, will search for new animal species at unprecedented depths.

Isis conducted video surveys of the ocean floor with two mechanisms. First, an Atlas three-chip charge video camera filmed hori-zontal surveys of the seascape. This cam-era was mounted to view the seafloor with the help of an HMI light, like those used in the film and entertainment industry, and two focal lasers. Then, Isis’s built-in high-definition pan-and-tilt camera took vertical video surveys. “These features enabled the ROV to undertake vertical lines up and

A collection of photos taken by the Isis ROV’s two autonomous cameras shows a vast array of undiscovered wildlife under the sea. Image courtesy PLoS Biology.

down chimneys, offset by fixed horizontal distances, to obtain overlapping video im-ages of the structure from a particular head-ing,” researchers wrote in a report on the expedition published by PLoS Biology.

Isis has already discovered a new species of crab. The newly minted yeti crab is a tiny, almost translucent white crab with small hairs covering its chest, as opposed to the hairy claws more commonly found on Pacific crabs. Scientists believe these hairs act as a self-sustaining food source for the animal: The crabs grow bacteria on the hairs and then harvest the microbes for nutrients. The yeti crab finds strength in numbers, with up to 55 of them occupying a single square foot around a hypothermal vent.

The National Oceanography Centre South-ampton commissioned Isis in July 2006 for a series of test dives at depths up to 6,500 meters. Isis has since traveled to Marguerite Bay, Antarctica and the Portuguese coast to study everything from mud volcanoes to the Antarctic Circle.

NOAA uses UAS to track black carbonThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with six countries, performed a studied in 2011 on the po-tential role of black carbon, better known as soot, in the Arctic by using two small unmanned aerial vehicles.

“Carbon is dark in color and absorbs solar radiation, much like wearing a black shirt on a sunny day. If you want to be cooler, you would wear a light-colored shirt that would reflect the sun’s warmth,” says Tim Bates, a research chemist at NOAA’s Pacific Ma-rine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash., and co-lead of the U.S. component of the study. “When black carbon covers snow and ice, the radiation is absorbed, much like that black shirt, instead of being reflected back into the atmosphere.”

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001234


Essential Components — continued from Page 5

NOAA used the Manta UAV to track soot in the Arctic atmosphere. Photo courtesy BAE Systems.

The project, called the Climate-Cryosphere Interactions, paired NOAA up with Nor-way, Russia, Germany, Italy and China to provide a vertical profile of black carbon’s movement throughout the atmosphere, its deposits on snow and ice, and its effect on the Arctic.

Runs by the UAVs followed initial observa-tions taken from ships and land-based tech-nologies.

NOAA’s portion of the study, the Soot Trans-port, Absorption and Deposition Study, use two BAE Systems Manta UAVs with aerosol measuring sensors.

GD’sbuyofAxsysyields newimagingsystemsCustomers needing precision perimeter sur-veillance systems and even broadcast and film companies could benefit from products from General Dynamics Global Imaging Technologies, a new organization created in the wake of the company’s 2009 acquisi-tion of Axsys Technologies.

The new company will target defense, homeland security, law enforcement and

commercial customers around the world, offering electro-optical/infrared cameras, precision optical components, motion con-trol systesm and even Axsys’ Cineflex stabi-lized gimbal cameras, used to image such productions as the BBC’s “Planet Earth” series.

“As we continue to expand on General Dy-namics Global Imaging Technologies’ pro-grams, products and solutions, customers will benefit from our more fully integrated portfolio of end-to-end imagery offerings,” says Lou Von Thaer, president of General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems.

NRLturnstomicrobesto powerfuturerovers

Electron microscope image of Geobacter

sulfurreducens, the core of the microbial fuel

cell-based system being studied by the Naval Research Laboratory. Image courtesy NRL.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is looking at a novel way to aid future space and planetary research: by using microbe-based fuel cells to power tiny planetary rov-ers.

Robotic exploration in remote regions is often limited by energy requirements, so NRL’s Spacecraft Engineering Department envisions a rover weighing less than one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and powered by an advanced microbial fuel cell, or MFC.

“The goal is to demonstrate a more efficient and reliable energy source for use in pow-ering small robotic vehicles in environments where the option for human intervention is non-existent,” says Gregory P. Scott, a space robotics scientist at NRL. “Microbial fuel cells coupled with extremely low-power electronics and a low energy requirement for mobility addresses gaps in power tech-nology applicable to all robotic systems, especially planetary robotics.”

Part of the energy generated by the MFC would maintain onboard electronics and control systems with the rest slowly charg-ing a battery or capacitor. The lab selected the MFC because of its durability — micro-organisms can reproduce and have a high energy densit compared with traditional lithium-ion batteries.

Scott was selected as a fellow to the newly reinstated NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, and was awarded a re-search grant to investigate the initial phase of the concept.


Discovery and exploration:Ocean Observatories Initiative takes shape under the oceans

ver the past decade, scientists and fishermen off the coasts of

Oregon and Washington have noted a puzzling influx of oxygen-deficient water, which can kill fish and crabs and harm the livelihoods of those who depend on them.

The problem wasn’t local pollution; instead, it involved masses of water moving in from the central North Pacific, losing oxygen along the way due to natural processes.

“It’s a complicated suite of things that hap-pen, but it’s not easy to predict, and so what we think we now know is that rela-tively lower oxygen water from the central North Pacific actually is advected through large-scale ocean processes. [It] gets closer to the coastline, the normal … upwelling process brings that slightly lower-than-nor-mal oxygen-containing water, the normal processes on the shelf of upwelling and reduction of organic matter depletes that

below a threshold, and suddenly you have unusual hypoxic conditions that kill fish and crabs, and yet it’s not local. It’s caused by something that’s 5,000 kilometers away,” says Timothy Cowles, the vice president and director for Ocean Observing Programs at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership.

The consortium is heading up a new way of studying such issues, which is being cre-ated off the coasts of the United States, Greenland, Brazil and Chile. It involves an

O

ByBRETTDAVIS

Deploying a buoy that will be part of the OOI. All images courtesy the Consortium for Ocean Leadership.


Maritime Exploration — continued from Page 7

array of sensors, underwater vehicles, in-strumented moorings and high-data-rate ca-bles feeding information from the bottom of the sea to the top, feeding data from about 800 instruments to researchers around the world — including you, if you want to see it.

It’s the Ocean Observatories Initiative: a National Science Foundation-funded pro-gram intended to conduct a top-to-bottom study of ocean activities over the span of up to three decades.

“Every time we can entrain new technol-ogy and new tools into our observations of the natural world, it’s as if it opens a new window through which we can view natural processes in a new way,” Cowles tells Mis-sion Critical. “Then you get new insights, and you end up with a whole list of new questions everything you look through a new window. And that’s where we think the Ocean Observatories Initiative is go-ing to be a particularly powerful, because we have never had the opportunity to have so many sustained data streams from so many different locations where the most ad-vanced sensors are being used from the sea surface to the seafloor.”

Work on the system began in 2009 and is expected to take five years, with the first data becoming available in 2013. The data will be available to “anyone who can click a mouse,” Cowles says.

Arrays“The OOI is some combination of a discov-ery and exploration,” Cowles says. “Ob-viously in lots of scientific fields you have things that can be called observatories, whether they are telescopes on a mountain-top or a weather station that is a piece of a large observatory. What we are trying to do with the OOI, the concept, is we are really an ocean telescope and the eyes are many distributed elements in the volume of the ocean.”

The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are vast

and, despite having hundreds of sensors arrayed throughout its structure, the OOI will take up “only a tiny, tiny piece of that volume,” Cowles says.

The layout of the system, however, will en-able scientists to measure various proper-ties and processes from the sea-air interface all the way down to the seafloor, and in some cases things that percolate through the seafloor, such as volcanoes or hydro-thermal vents.

meters (311 to 1,575 feet) deep. The profil-ers, each packed with a variety of sensors, will travel up and down the mooring lines to study the vertical columns of water, measur-ing such things as oxygen content, water velocity and salinity.

The Pioneer Array will also include six glid-ers traveling in a saw-tooth pattern between the surface and near the seafloor, along the continental shelf waters. Each will carry five instruments, including ones to measure temperature, pressure and photosyntheti-cally available radiation. Teledyne Webb, a pioneer in gliders (see Timeline on Page 28), has been tapped to provide Slocum gliders customized to the OOI mission, with production deliveries scheduled for 2012.

The array will also include three autono-mous underwater vehicles that will travel along the shelf break frontal system, also traveling in a saw-tooth pattern and carry similar instruments. Hydroid has been tapped to provide its Remus 600 AUVs for that work; OOI has awarded it a $1 mil-lion contract for initial design work for the AUVs, with production contracts to follow.

“The interplay in the Pioneer Array between the fixed assets in one box, the AUVs in a slightly larger box, and the gliders in a slightly even larger box, and then cross pat-terns, we start to resolve a spatial pattern of phenomena that previously were really hard to do, especially in a persistent way,” Cowles says. “You could go out and mount a three-week expedition and have two or three ships, but you’d be done in two or three weeks, and now what we’re trying to do is extend that through time so we can capture events and capture phenomena that you have to be really lucky to capture if you’re just out on a three-week expedition with two or three ships.”

The West Coast array, named the Endur-ance Array, is based off the coasts of Oregon and Washington and consists of three fixed platform sites, at 25-, 80- and 500-meter depths. It also has something

“Every time we can entrain

new technology and new

tools into our observations of

the natural world, it’s as if it

opens a new window through

which we can view natural

processes in a new way”

–Timothy Cowles

The OOI consists of two large arrays of sys-tems, one on the East Coast of the United States, about 80 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and one on the West Coast, near Oregon and Washington.

The East Coast array, known as the Pioneer Array, is located at the continental shelf break, where water depths drop from about 100 meters to more than 500 meters in a distance as short as 40 kilometers. It’s a boundary region between cool coastal wa-ters and warmer offshore and Gulf Stream waters.

The Pioneer Array includes three surface moorings and seven profiler moorings mounted in waters from 95 meters to 480


unique: two cables that deliver power to nodes and instruments under the sea and high-speed data back to land.

The two submarine cables were connect-ed to land networks this summer. The first extends to a study site at Hydrate Ridge, about 75 miles off the coast of Pacific City, Ore., and loops back to the Endurance Ar-ray; the second stretches 310 miles west to the Axial Seamount underwater volcano study site on the Juan de Fuca Ridge.

The use of cables, Cowles says, is “huge. The people who are directly involved with that at the University of Washington are wonderful evangelists for the use of cables and fundamentally, as far as we are con-cerned in ocean science, it’s almost unlim-ited power and bandwidth and to imagine that you’ve got basically a T1 line to instru-ments on the seafloor. It’s pretty cool.”

The coolness stems not just from getting data back in a hurry, but providing steady power to the instruments, which allows them to do more.

“Not only will the cable be connecting things on the seafloor, but it will be connect-ed to instrument platforms that are monitor-ing the entire water column,” Cowles says. “So we are going to have profilers that are going up and down that are drawing power from the cable, and they’re not go-ing to just rely on batteries or solar power to work. … This is a first. We’re not exactly sure what new windows that will open for us, because we’ll be able to put more hard-ware on those profilers. The profilers will be able to go up and down more frequently, all of those things are going to give us new sets of observations that we think are pretty exciting.”

Station to stationIn addition to the arrays, there will be four other stations, each made up of more mod-est equipment. One is Station Papa, locat-ed in the north Pacific, farther up the North American coast from the Endurance Array and farther out to sea. It consists of a hybrid profiler mooring and two moorings without profilers, as well as three gliders that will

move between them.

Another station in the Irminger Sea, south-east of Greenland, will have four moorings, including one with a moving profiler and three gliders moving between them. The same setup is scheduled for the Argentine Basin in the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil, as well as the Southern Ocean sta-tion, southwest of Chile.

The original plans for the OOI, before the engineers and accountants got involved, called for a much more extensive network of sensors, including a dozen monitoring sites around the globe and moorings “pep-pering the perimeter of the U.S. coastline.” Budget reality scaled that back to the cur-rent planned setup, but Cowles says the sites remaining “do have a strong scientific justification, in that each of the areas that’s got part of the infrastructure has something oceanographically important that happens in that region, and we’re trying to get an understanding not only of that region, but how it compares spatially to a distant site.”

An illustration of the two underwater cables that are part of the Endurance Array, and which provide a critical high-speed link to land.


Lowering a wire-climbing profiler into the Atlantic.

What it meansOOI is funded at $386 million, which pays for the construction and installation of the cables, instruments and vehicles, as well as the initial operation. The projected life-time of the overall system is up to 30 years, although the maintenance cycle for many of the individual components is six to 12 months, given that they will be operating in the harsh windy, salty environment of the oceans.

The main value of the system is that it pro-vides a long-term, continuous stream of data against which various experiments can be conducted. Scientists can propose instruments or studies that can be deployed for a short period of time, and then that data can be compared to “this huge array of background context” that the OOI is gen-erating, Cowles says.

“I think it’s a reasonable analogy to say it’s a little bit like the transition we made 30 or 40 years ago from aerial photographs to satellite earth system sensing capabilities, where you could move from snapshots of the Earth’s surface to movies of the planet surface,” he says.

Going from “snapshots to movies” under the oceans can lead to a better understand-ing of how bodies of water — which make up 70 percent of the Earth’s surface — af-fect everything else. It could lead to better storm prediction, greater understanding of phenomena such as volcanoes, or “a major water mass incursion that changes coastal dynamics,” such as the low-oxygen water that appears off the West Coast and kills fish.

“Every time we can entrain new technol-ogy and new tools into our observations of

Maritime Exploration — continued from Page 9

the natural world, it’s as if it opens a new window through which we can view natu-ral processes in a new way,” Cowles says. “Then you get new insights, and you end up with a whole list of new questions every time you look through a new window. And that’s where we think the Ocean Observa-tories Initiative is going to be a particularly powerful, because we have never had the opportunity to have so many sustained data streams from so many different locations where the most advanced sensors are be-ing used from the sea surface to the sea-floor. If we can just get it built.”

Brett Davis is editor of Mission Critical.


The partnersThe Ocean Observatories Initiative is being funded by the National Sci-ence Foundation, managed and coor-dinated by the Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s OOI Project Office, and implemented by various industry and academic partners:

• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and its partners, Oregon State University and Scripps Insti-tution of Oceanography, which are responsible for the coastal moorings and autonomous vehicles

• The University of Washington, which is responsible for the regional cabled seafloor systems and moorings

• The University of California San Diego, which is developing the computing infrastructure

• Rutgers and its partners, the University of Maine and Raytheon Mission Operations and Services, are responsible for the education and public engagement software.

Teledyne preps two kinds of gliders for OOIGlider pioneer Teledyne Webb is devel-oping two types of gliders for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, both based on its venerable Slocum glider platform.

“There are two components to the OOI for gliders,” says Clayton Jones, a se-nior director at the company. “One is coastal, one is open-ocean.”

The coastal gliders will concentrate more on coastal water dynamics, including the appearance of low-oxygen zones, and the open ocean gliders will monitor conductivity, temperature and depth.

The Slocum G2 glider the company has developed “is basically a modular platform that is rated for 1,000 meters [depth], but you can slide in alternative payload bays or pumps that will be op-timized for the pressures that you’re go-ing to dive to.”

The coastal version will carry a CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth) sensor, oxygen sensor and an optical payload to measure backscatter, chloro-phyll and dissolved organic matter along with providing PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) data. There’s also an acoustic Doppler current profiler, which uses sound to monitor water speed and motion.

“For the open ocean, it’s a little more limited,” Jones says, although they will take on the critical function of commu-nication. Those gliders won’t carry PAR and ADCP, instead adding an acoustic modem.

“There will be some deep-ocean moor-ings, and not all of them will have sur-

face constructs” that would allow them to communicate, he says. “The gliders will act as gateway gliders — they fly to the mooring, download the data acousti-cally, then relay that information to the control center. They are doing that in addition to getting and making transects between the moorings.” One mooring in the deep-ocean arrays will have a sur-face buoy, but “for the other two in the triangle, these are the communications.”

The open-ocean gliders will gain an ad-ditional payload bay for an additional battery supply, as they will be conduct-ing their missions for up to a year at a time.

While most of the glider technology for the OOI will be off-the-shelf, the extend-ed endurance adds a bit of a challenge, as does the 5,000 meters deep commu-nications relay, Jones says.

“This is a great program. This will be a lot of fun; it’s stuff that we’ve all talked about before … so it’s exciting to go through the process steps of, what would you like to achieve for the science, and how do we do that?”

A coastal glider has already been de-livered to the OOI for testing, and the open-ocean design is “coming along nicely,” he says.

The gliders will work alongside the pow-ered autonomous underwater vehicles, which are being provided by Hydroid. If the gliders discover something of inter-est as they move along their paths, the powered vehicles can be dispatched to check it out.

“It’s been a really good group to work with,” Jones says of the OOI. “Every-body’s rowing in the same direction.”

OOIOOIOcean ObservatOries initiative

sCan it or Click it:To get updates on the OOI.

http://www.oceanobservatories.org/


South Shetland Islands, Antarctica

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has performed penguin popula-tion counts here using a flying hexacopter UAS. The research-ers were able to do their work quicker, and the penguins did not notice the system when it flew higher than 100 feet.

Tuckerton, N.J., to Baiona, Spain

The Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sci-ences’ undersea Slocum glider, dubbed Scarlet Knight after the school’s mascot, traveled 7,400 kilometers across the Atlantic on a 221-day journey in 2009, dodging storms, hurricanes and ships along the way. The Slocum glider also became the star of the documentary “Atlantic Crossing: A Robot’s Dar-ing Mission,” which won awards at several film festivals.

Boise State University, Idaho

The U.S. Geological Survey used a fleet of 17 Raven UAVs, donated by the Army, to track pygmy rabbit habitats what would otherwise be difficult for humans to get to. Researchers say the use of UAVs allowed them to evaluate 10 times more terrain than would be possible with a manned mission.

Off the Coasts of Oregon and Massachusetts

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is under construc-tion now. It will consist to two large arrays featuring a variety of moorings, and the array on the West Coast will feature two undersea cables as well, which will bring information off the seafloor at high data rates. Both sites will feature underwater moorings as well as gliders and autonomous underwater vehicles. Look for data to start flowing to your computer in 2013.

Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge, Rio Grande, Colo.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have tracked sandhill crane populations here in early 2011 using AeroVironment Ravens.

It’s a small world after allstatE oF tHE art

Argentine Basin, South Atlantic

Location: 42°S, 42°W

The South Pacific OOI node.

Station Papa, North Pacific

Location: 50°N, 145°W

The North Pacific OOI node.

Southern Ocean, SW of Chile

Location: 55°S, 90°W

The Southern Ocean OOI node.

San Francisco, Calif.

Liquid Robotics launched four of its autonomous surface vessels, Wave Glid-ers, from this point in November 2011. The company is on a mission to perform the longest unmanned ocean voyage in history. After swimming together to Ha-waii, the robots will set off on different paths, with two going to Japan and the other pair sailing to Australia.


Summit Station, Greenland

Robots from Dartmouth University performed missions in this harsh climate, seeking information on the ionosphere and magne-tosphere and how charged particles would interact with Earth’s magnetic field as a part of climate change research.

Gale Crater, Mars

NASA’s newest and largest ever rover Curiosity will spend its time here, looking for signs that the planet is safe to roam by future astronauts. The latest estimate on Curiosity’s touchdown is 6 Aug.

El Giza, Egypt

A robot is undergoing a series of mis-sions, exploring the Great Pyramid of Giza. So far, it has unveiled new hiero-glyphics and details that may eventu-ally lead to the finding of the pyramid’s possibly dual hidden chambers.

Challenger Deep, Marina Trench, 11”21’ N, 142” 12’ E

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Nereus remotely operated vehicle dove to the deepest spot in the ocean, the Challenger Deep, in May 2009. The mission made the ROV the deepest diving ever.

Irminger Sea, SE of Greenland

Location: 60°N, 39°W

The Ocean Observatories Initiative also includes other instrument nodes, each smaller than the arrays off the coast of the United States. Each will feature moorings and gliders.

With the help of robotics, scientists, researchers and companies can gather information about our planet (and a couple others to boot), all the while cutting costs and mitigating the risks of putting humans in such harsh environments for extended periods of time. Here’s a look at some of the most far-flung missions robots have ever performed.

Vardo, Norway

Swedish UAV manufacturer CybAero has flown its APID 60 unmanned helicopter over the Arctic Ocean in winds of up to gale force, to show its suitability for a variety of missions, including for oil and gas pipeline monitoring.


Coldhardfacts

egative 24.5 degrees Celsius — that is the average temperature mea-

sured by the National Science Foundation during a recent summer at Summit Station, a year-round research camp located on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Only accessible via a C-130 Hercules that lands on a snow runway, it’s at this remote station — 285 miles (460 kilometers) from the nearest town — that Dartmouth researchers, in a joint project with the University of New Hampshire and the U.S. Army’s Cold Re-

ByDANIELLELUCEy

Robots—andtheircreators

Yeti gets ready to traverse the snowy terrain in Antarctica on a 2010 mis-sion. All photos courtesy Eric M. Traut-mann, Laura Ray, Dartmouth University.

gions Research, camped out for one week this past July.

Using unmanned aerial vehicles at these temperatures is a bit of old hat, though it can be difficult in poor conditions. But get-ting a ground robot to wheel along through some uncharacteristically soft, fresh summer snow is a big challenge.

“The robot’s not meant to work in pow-dery snow,” says Laura Ray, a professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineer-

ing. Greenland’s weather had other ideas, dropping about a foot and a half of snow on the ground during the one week the re-searchers were there.

“In fact, the time of the season we were up there, it was July in Greenland, the particu-lar robot we were using on this mission was not the one that we intended to use.”

Dartmouth got involved in the subzero proj-ect when the team created a robot aimed at measuring the ionosphere and magneto-

bravethecoldofthepoles inthenameofscience

N


sphere —respectively, a layer of upper at-mosphere and a plume of charged particles and how they interact with Earth’s magnetic field. The robot would traverse Antarctica during the austral summer and fuel itself off of solar power to survey the region.

While this type work is easier to do at the poles, the South Pole has added travel, expense and timing challenges for the stu-dents involved. The team for now is focused on Arctic exploration.

Through a grant with the National Science Foundation, Dartmouth built a robot, called Cool Robot, and proved its viability.

To create a robot capable of operating over snow, the team focused on setting budgets for its mass and energy.

“In order to work in any terrain that’s de-formable, such as this, you’d like a low ground pressure,” says Ray. “And then the

second thing, of course, is that you want to use the least energy that you can to make this possible.”

Ray says they started the Cool Robot project before they knew if a solar-powered cold weather robot “was even feasible.” Once the team set a target ground pressure, they set a mass budget so the robot would still be functional on wheels.

“Once you get into tracks you’re all of the sudden at a much higher energy budget.”

To make the chassis, the team used Nomex, a Nylon-related polymer. With fiberglass plies on the outside and a honeycomb mid-dle, the material can be used as airplane floor panels. The team cut and folded the material into a box to create the chassis and reinforced it with aluminum bracing.

Then they had to tackle creating their own solar panels.

“In the beginning we were envisioning a very large panel that would face the sun, but that panel turned out to be much too large, and it would probably be more like a sail and probably flip the robot over,” Ray says.

For the power, the team took advantage of the high reflection of the snow they knew would be present. Without having any so-lar cells, Ray’s team roughed out on paper how much power it could get from a low sun angle with direct sunlight and reflec-tion.

“It turned out that the reflected piece was big enough that it made sense to make this solar panel into a box,” says Ray. The box would go over the top of the robot with pan-els on the sides and top. “Even if you have the sun directly on one of the panels, the one opposite that in the back, even though it’s in the shade, gets a decent fraction of

Yeti was used to shake down the instruments Dartmouth plans on using on another mission with

its other cold-weather robot, Yeti.


energy through reflections off the snow.”

The team made the 65-kilogram solar pan-els itself, again using Nomex as backing.

“Then, subsequent to that, we said, ‘Now we have the robot. Let’s do some science with it,’” says Ray.

Yeti stands in for Cool RobotThe Greenland project, now in its second year, uses Dartmouth’s backup robot, Yeti, to shake down the instrumentation that will eventually be used on Cool Robot.

Cool Robot is currently undergoing modi-fications to its solar box that will improve its efficiency and give it more ground clear-ance, says Ray.

“And that’s a long lead item, so that’s what’s on the drawing board for this year.”

Yeti uses battery power and has a passive joint between its front and back wheels to traverse difficult terrain.

“It’s hard to get that robot stuck,” says Ray.

The robot was originally made for a sepa-rate mission in Antarctica that aimed to sur-vey a cargo route for crevasses by using a ground-penetrating radar Yeti pulls behind it. Since flying in supplies to McMurdo Sta-tion — a research center on Ross Island — is costly, cargo typically comes to Antarc-tica by ship, and it is then transported by ground to the station.

Before using robots, an operator would watch a screen for eight to 10 hours a day that was relaying footage taken from radar on a 6-meter boom attached to a manned PistenBully snow groomer leading a con-voy.

“It’s a very difficult image to interpret,” says Ray. “If he finds a crevasse, he hits a red

button to stop. And he has about two sec-onds before the tractor is over the crevasse to hit the button. So that’s not a very fun job.”

Yeti is light enough that when it crosses a crevasse, it will not fall in, so the radar is simply outfitted behind the robot, says Ray.

“What we’re trying to do with Yeti is ob-viously not eliminate the operator, but you can send a robot out to pre-survey a route that you are intending to survey.”

Over the next two or so years, the team hopes to formalize autonomous crevasse detection, though the work is currently un-funded.

For the NSF work at Summit Station, Yeti was outfitted with an aerosol package to measure particulate count in the air, moni-toring its environmental footprint and, through another instrument, measure the surface roughness of the snow. Both are

Cold Hard Facts — continued from Page 15

Dartmouth’s other robot, Cool Robot, is powered up by solar cells, which optimize the reflection of light off the snow to stay charged up.


good indicators of climate change, says Ray.

The harsh conditions actually proved too much for one of the two recently graduated undergraduate researchers on Ray’s proj-ect. Plagued by altitude sickness once at Summit Station, which sits at 3,216 meters above sea level — around the same height as the Pyrenees Mountains of southwest Eu-rope — one of Ray’s two students on the project had to leave the mission. This left the one student to deal with maneuvering the robot largely on his own.

“Once in a while he’d have a hand from other groups working around there, and you’re working in fairly extreme condi-tions,” says Ray. “I think they had maybe small heated space that they could work in, but it was fairly cramped. Just moving the robot around is quite difficult on your own. It’s not heavy, but really, you need two people.”

The snow also closed the testing window from the full week to only two days.

“Yeti is a little heavier [than Cool Robot], so it sinks more in that snow,” says Ray.

The robot would use its aerosol sensor to pick up a plume being generated nearby. Using GPS waypoints, Yeti would autono-mously navigate a pattern so it would cross the region where the plume was being pushed by the wind and then stay inside the plume for sometime waiting for a peak measurement. Then the robot would exit the plume to get a general mapping of the ex-tent of the plume dispersal.

“They were able to do one run that was maybe about half of the distance that we would have like to have done,” says Ray. “Unfortunately, they had trouble getting be-yond the outer extent of the camp boundar-ies.”

The boundaries of the 10,000-square-foot Summit Station are made more difficult to traverse because of plowing that creates massive berms around the camp.

“One person could not get the robot over that to explore beyond that,” she says.

“This was really, again, not outside of our plan because we had planned for a very short deployment the first time around, re-ally to just shake down the instruments, and I think we accomplished that.”

Though the testing was short lived, Ray called it successful.

The team hopes to deploy again to Summit for a longer period of time in 2013, and then, in the final year of the project, per-form an overland autonomous deployment where the robot goes ahead of a traverse team.

Danielle Lucey is managing editor of Mis-sion Critical.

Yeti pulls its ground-penetrating radar as it explores Greenland in a photo from a 2008 mission.


David J. Fratello is the payload manager for NASA’s Global Hawk

Project out of Dryden Flight Research Center in California. Fratello has

worked with NASA to develop Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel

(HS3) in 2011 and Genesis and Rapid Intensification Project (GRIP) in

2010. These missions explore the role the atmosphere plays in creating

natural disasters like hurricanes.

GRIP campaign, as well as HS3, used

remote sensors, so we were peering

down into the hurricane from above,

gathering data remotely.

Q: What can unmanned aircraft do for

HS3, and other NASA atmospheric

programs, that other technologies cannot?

A: It’s really driven by the endurance of

the aircraft. We typically have a flight

time of eight hours with manned flights.

The case in point with HS3: We’re

going to be deploying out of [NASA

Goddard Space Flight Center’s] Wal-

lops, and I know that one of the inter-

ests of the campaign is to investigate

what’s called the Sahara Wave. It’s

the genesis process atmospherically

for hurricane development out in the

eastern portion of the Atlantic coming

off Africa. They’ll send us to the eastern

Q&A: David J. FratelloQ & a

Q: What are some of the risks involved

with flying the Global Hawk in vola-

tile weather patterns such as hurricanes?

A: We take safety very seriously here,

and we don’t accept risks unnecessar-

ily, but what we did was we modified

the aircraft with some additional situa-

tion awareness sensors for the pilots:

a day/night nose camera, calibrated

accelerator on the aircraft with real-

time feedback, things like that. Then

we had a team of scientists and meteo-

rologists monitor satellite-based data

giving us cloud-top temperature so we

knew what kind of turbulence the air-

craft would see. We don’t just fly into

moderate, and certainly not heavy, tur-

bulence.

The benefit of our aircraft is that we’re

so high. Most aircraft don’t have seri-

ous turbulence at 16,000 feet. The

Payload ManagerNASA Global Hawk Project Dryden Flight Research Center

Q: What kind of programs have you

participated in to test the Global

Hawk technologies? What did you learn?

A: A year ago we participated in a

NASA hurricane campaign GRIP, and

that was a mobile hurricane research

campaign. The three aircraft flew mul-

tiple hurricane events last year, and

that was our first time taking the Global

Hawks intentionally toward severe

weather. That was pretty dramatic.

We hadn’t done that before. The real

reason that we exist here is because

the unique flight capabilities of this jet.

We’re at high altitudes and we can

stay up there for a very long time, and

so it’s a real game changer for NASA

airborne science.


edge of the Atlantic to measure the Sa-

haran wave coming off Africa. There’s

no way a manned aircraft could fly out

across the Atlantic, and stay there for

10 hours like we can, and then come

back and land in Virginia.

For GRIP we’ve launched out of Ed-

wards [Air Force Base], and Hurricane

Earl was coming up the east shore of

Florida, and we flew from here over to

the Atlantic and stayed over Hurricane

Earl and had more eye passes than

any manned aircraft had, and yet we

were eight hours from home. That kind

of endurance really is a game changer.

Q: Have you been shopping around

for additional sensor technology to

make the mission more successful?

A: We continue to look at how we can

improve the aircraft, how we can ap-

ply it and get more and more info from

it. We just purchased some better night

vision cameras, we just purchased

weather radar that we’re going to be

installing on the jet, and other things

like that to give our pilots better situ-

ational awareness. The point is if they

have more information, they may feel

they can take the airplane into places

that you might not otherwise

Q: When most people think NASA, they

think of the space shuttles. Why is

it important for NASA to do research at the

atmospheric level with unmanned systems?

A: Most people don’t appreciate the

fact that the first A in NASA is aeronau-

tics. Most people do associate NASA

with space, so most of them don’t know

we’ve been investing in aeronautic re-

search for decades. We have a very

active science program here. NASA’s

hallmark is satellite capability and re-

mote sensing.

NASA has a very strong atmospheric

science program to understand things

like global climate change, etc. We

have a fleet of aircraft that allow us to

put the sensors into the atmosphere.

We’re looking to get better resolution

of the measurements, actually sample

the air and fly through it. You can look

at the hurricane from space, but when

you put dual-band radar 60,000 feet

over the hurricane, you can map it with

pretty high resolution.

Q: What is the significance of NASA

focusing all of this attention on

unmanned systems, especially since the iconic

shuttle program ended in 2011?

A: From the airborne science aspect,

we’ve wanted to get these Global

Hawks for a number of years. Four

years ago, the project manager found

out these three preproduction airplanes

would be available; they’d be removed

from Air Force activity. We were very

pleased they were able to transfer

these aircraft to us.

To us the unmanned capability isn’t

so much that it’s unmanned. The un-

manned aircraft is simply able to do

things that the manned plane can’t.

NASA has used its Global Hawks to monitor hurricanes and to conduct atmospheric research. Photo courtesy NASA Dryden/Carla Thomas.

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Redrover

uch as been made in the media in the last few months about the unmanning of space explora-tion, technology lapses that replace shuttles and space stations with rovers and rocket launches. But

NASA’s new robot is the first step in what may one day be man’s largest leap — sending a person to the surface of Mars.

The Atlas V rocket, operated jointly between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, lifted the Mars Science Laboratory out of orbit, leaving Florida’s Space Coast on 27 Nov. This marks 10 months after Ken-nedy Space Center hosted the final space shuttle mission, which also took a robot into orbit. NASA, GM and Oceaneering International’s Robonaut 2 headed to the International Space Station on Discovery.

NASA’s shift from manned to unmanned missions isn’t the only turning point marked by this mission. The last time NASA sent rovers to Mars, Spirit and Opportunity as part of the Mars Exploration Rover program in summer 2003, the mission was searching for rocks and soil that would indicate Mars had a watery past.

The Mars Science Laboratory’s mission goes a significant step be-yond that. By characterizing the climate and geology of Mars, NASA is seeking to gain as much knowledge of the Red Planet as it can so one day it can mark a bold shift in history, sending a human to another planet.

M

ByDANIELLELUCEy

Atlas V with the Mars Science Laboratory on board, launches from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on 27 Nov. Photo courtesy NASA/Scott Andrews/Canon.

NASAsendsCuriosityonover toMarsontheagency’s mostboldmissionyet


Mars Exploration — continued from Page 21

‘A Mars scientist’s dream machine’To mark this mission’s big paradigm shift, NASA went big with Curiosity, the mission’s solitary rover.

“It’s not your father’s rover,” says Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Explora-tion Program at NASA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.

Weighing in at 2,000 pounds on Earth and measuring up to six feet tall, the machine is “the largest and most complex system ever placed on another planet,” says McCuis-tion.

Its price tag ended up being big too, reach-ing a total $2.5 billion, according to The New York Times — 56 percent higher than the initial 2006 estimate for the project. However, the price, which includes two years of surface operations and data analy-sis that have yet to be performed, pales in comparison to many defense programs — $2.5 billion will buy about 15 fighter jets minus the research and development.

To power such a behemoth machine, NASA turned away from the solar technology used

for Spirit and Opportunity and turned to ra-dioisotopic power generated by plutonium — this rover’s nuclear. This is enough juice to keep Curiosity searching for at least one Martian year, about 687 Earth days.

A large power supply is important since po-tentially the most key element to this robot is its arm, which holds five different devices. Two are for in-situ measurements while the other three acquire and prepare samples. The devices can saw into Martian rocks to unearth their geological secrets, making it the first space-bound robot to ever do so.

Through the robot’s Sample Analysis on Mars payload, which at 83 pounds takes up about half of the robot’s available real estate, it will analyze these measurements by separating elements and compounds by mass and then heat the samples until they vaporize. It then separates the gases for analysis. The instrument is accurate to within 10 parts per thousand.

“We consider that sort of a science home run,” said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy proj-ect scientist for the project, at a NASA press conference.

Curiosity can also examine rocks by blast-

ing a laser from its Chemistry and Camera, or ChemCam, instrument, which excites a pinpoint spot on a rock with glowing, ion-ized gas. By analyzing the light spectrum, Curiosity can tell which elements are pres-ent in the rock, and it can get a closer look using its magnifying glass sensor. The robot can sense what is in front of it up to 20 feet.

That plutonium will also generate enough fuel to keep the rover mobile. The Mars Science Lab has six massive wheels, each with an individual motor. The wheels — a notorious issue for NASA since both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers got stuck at one point on the previous mission — can do full 360s.

“There’s a couple times on Mars where there’s some really soft sand that can get you kind of buried and your wheels can dig in a little bit,” says Eric Aguilar, system integration and test lead at NASA’s Jet Pro-pulsion Laboratory, MSL’s testing grounds. Enlarging the wheelbase allowed NASA to help balance the weight distribution of the vehicle so it would not get stuck as easily, he says.

Its rocker-bogie suspension system makes scaling over rocks and through holes with the 50-centimeter-diameter spiked wheels a fairly painless task. At top speed, they can move about 1.5 inches per second — about the same pace as its Mars Explora-tion Rover brothers. JPL tests, and will con-tinue to test, Curiosity through its twin rover, Scarecrow. The lab will still perform indoor and outdoor tests at its Mars Yard through the mission’s duration. (For more informa-tion, see Testing, Testing on Page 38.)

The rover can also measure the radiation levels on the planet, “critical for the day that we do send humans to Mars,” says Vasavada.

The rover uses a weather station for feed-back on the environment and can sound below its chassis to look for minerals and water as it creeps along.

“I can tell you that this is a Mars scientist’s dream machine,” says Vasavada.

The Mars Science Laboratory will be the first planetary mission to ever use an electrical umbilical system to lower Curiosity onto a planet’s surface. Image courtesy NASA.

sCan it or Click it:Click on the image or scan this barcode with your smartphone to see an animation of Curiosity’s unique entry, decent and landing maneuver. Animation courtesy NASA.

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movies/RoverAnimPart2.mov

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movies/RoverAnimPart2.mov


Coming in for a landingThe Mars Science Laboratory and its Curi-osity rover are due to land on Mars in early August 2012.

The Mars Exploration Rover mission landing vehicles were slowed down using a para-chute — technology also used on the Viking and Mars Pathfinder mission programs — and then slowed further by rocket-assisted descent motors. The Mars Science Labo-ratory mission is breaking from tradition, simulating a landing that would be more realistic for a human crew to replicate.

MSL will still use a parachute and rockets to temper its landing, but it will be the first planetary mission to use a guided entry landing. This improves the landing accu-racy to a range of about 12 miles, versus hundreds of miles like in the past. Onboard computing will allow the entry vehicle to steer itself toward a pre-determined landing site.

After its parachutes slow the vehicle and it separates from its heat shield, necessary only for entry, reverse rockets will stabilize the vehicle as a trio of tethers and an electri-cal umbilical cord act much like a crane on planet Earth to gently lower the rover to the ground. Also unlike Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity will separate from its protective

layer prior to landing, enabling it to get right to roving.

While it’s impossible for NASA to end-to-end test this entry, descent and landing scenario, project manager for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pete Theisinger says the agency is as confident as it can be.

“To the extent that we’ve been able to think of it, we’ve attacked all the problems and

done all the testing that we can do,” he says.

Once Curiosity gets its space legs, it will find itself at Gale Crater, a location NASA scientists painstakingly chose for its wealth of geological potential.

Much like the Grand Canyon on Earth, Gale Crater hosts layers of soil that essen-tially tell the history of geology on Mars.

NASA already knows that images of Gale indicate it has geological evidence of wa-ter, says Vasavada. Now the agency is looking for organics in hopes of finding a habitable environment for microbes.

Looking for water “is sort of in the rear view mirror now, and we’ve moved onto this evidence of a habitable environment,” says Vasavada.

“Really we’re reading the early history of Mars. … If any of those [samples] really scream out that those were a really habit-able environment, we’ll tell you,” he said during the NASA press conference.

Gale Crater was down-selected in a pro-cess that started with more than 50 sites. Eventually NASA picked four sites: Gale Crater, with a tall mountain of layered soil; Holden Crater, a dried-up lake bed;

Curiosity is equipped with a rock-studying laser, able to determine the elements and compounds in the soil. Image courtesy NASA.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tests Curiosity’s Earth-bound twin, Scarecrow, at the facility’s Mars Yard. Photo courtesy NASA/JPL/Cal-Tech.


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Eberswalde Crater, the site of an ancient river delta; and Mawrth Vallis, a channel created by catastrophic flooding. John Grant, a geologist at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, likened choosing one of the four sites to picking which flavor ice cream to eat — it comes down to which one feels right.

“There’s no hard yes or no answer,” he said at a NASA press conference held in the summer of 2011.

“We think Gale Crater is going to be a great novel,” he said. Even if NASA doesn’t find organics, Grant said that as Curiosity ascends the mountain, it will tell the history of the Mars environment through what it does find. It will take two years to get to the summit, he estimates, but with all the interesting facts the rover could find along the way, that could slow to 10 years.

Pete Theisinger from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory says Curiosity has no life-limiting consumable on the design and the power source should last “a great number of years.” Since Gale Crater does not have the dust or winter issues of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, there is no condition pushing the rover to wear out.

“The thing at the top of my concern list is what I don’t know,” says Theisinger. “These things are very compli-cated, and we test the heck out of them … [but] there’s always going to be surprises.”

Danielle Lucey is managing editor of Mission Critical.

NASA scientists testing the laboratory’s entry, decent and landing at Kennedy Space Center. Photo courtesy NASA.

NASA’s largest rover yet, Curiosity, is currently on its way to Mars on a mission to find organic material. Photo courtesy NASA/JPL/Cal-Tech.

Mars Exploration — continued from Page 23


from their sensor systems. This allows the vehicles to better detect obstacles in low vis-ibility environments and helps them tackle difficult operations such as tracking miles of subsea pipeline.

As advances in the technology continue, Dan McLeod, senior program manager at Lockheed Martin, anticipates growing in-terest for AUVs to augment ROV capabili-ties for subsea oil and gas operations. The company’s Marlin AUV is being targeted at the offshore petroleum sector and is gain-ing traction as an ideal system for survey-ing applications and other more compli-cated missions. Unlike many AUVs today, McLeod says that the Marlin has increased capabilities that allow it to do more than the traditional patterned survey or simply “mowing the grass.”

“The Marlin AUV brings additional autono-my and intelligence that allows the vehicle to interact with the data it’s collecting,” McLeod says. “The vehicle is capable of interacting with its sonar and building 3-D models. These models are ideal for real-time change detection, which is important for monitoring offshore infrastructure.”

Going unmanned in the deep

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill brought an influx of attention to the world of offshore drilling; the role re-

motely operated vehicles play in the off-shore oil and gas industry and the potential for autonomous underwater vehicles to sup-port subsea monitoring operations. With the global demand for petroleum at an all time high, companies in the oil and gas sec-tor are exploring in the word’s most remote locations. In many cases the search for re-serves has reached miles below the ocean’s surface at depths inaccessible to divers and manned underwater technologies. As ex-ploration and drilling go further out and deeper in the world’s oceans, the need for autonomous technologies to ensure safe op-erations and divert potential environmental disaster has never been greater. Fortunate-ly, the unmanned systems industry is primed and ready to meet the call.

ROVs are not new to offshore drilling. In fact, the systems were operated as early as the 1960s and saw widespread use beginning in the 1980s. Small, shallow-water ROVs are used for routine monitoring and inspection, while much larger systems, some as large as cargo vans, tackle mis-sions involving equipment gripping and manipulation. Unlike ROVs, AUVs and un-manned surface vehicles have only recently seen more widespread operation in the oil and gas sector. Attributes including long endurance and low operating costs have intrigued the oil and gas industry and re-sulted in the systems being considered for a wide range of applications. More than a year after the Deepwater Horizon spill, AUVs continue to monitor the Gulf of Mexi-co to assess the environmental impact from the accident. But the systems are not limited to environmental monitoring, and a number of companies providing unmanned mari-

time vehicles have been quick to anticipate a growing need for unmanned surface and subsea technologies.

According to Bob Black, CEO of SeeByte Ltd., a software provider for unmanned platforms, ROVs and AUVs are a neces-sary technology as offshore oil and gas operations move into deeper water. Where divers were once used for subsea work, in many cases they have been replaced with remotely operated or autonomous systems capable of withstanding depths and pres-sures unfeasible for humans.

“Diving is a risky and expensive business, and reserves are being located in deeper and deeper waters,” Black says. “This is driving the demand for unmanned technolo-gies and taking the diver out of the equa-tion.”

ROVs and AUVs have been undergoing ma-jor technological advances that are propel-ling them into the oil and gas sector. Many of these advances have been in the sys-tems’ software and subsystems rather than the actual vehicle. For instance, SeeByte’s software is enabling AUVs to make sense of the data and information they are receiving

MarKEt rEPort

Lockheed Martin’s Marlin AUV is being targeted at the off-shore petroleum industry. Photo courtesy Lockheed Martin.

ByLINDSAyVOSS


As a result of increased capability, AUVs are more frequently being used for daunt-ing subsea applications. Missions requir-ing long endurance are best suited for the technologies and include pipeline moni-toring, site surveying, environmental sur-veying, equipment inspection and other applications requiring extensive time at sea. However, AUVs are still not capable enough to replace ROVs. While AUVs offer advantages such as tether-free operations, operating speeds of up to 4 knots and long endurance, according to McLeod the sys-tems lack intervention capability and the ability to transport tons of heavy equipment to underwater worksites. While McLeod an-ticipates AUVs could one day be capable of turning valves and accomplishing more complicated tasks, for now they will aug-ment, rather than replace, their remotely operated counterparts.

While AUVs have received increasing at-tention over the last year due to their op-erations in the Gulf of Mexico, they aren’t the only autonomous technologies making waves. Unmanned systems are also being used to assist the offshore oil and gas indus-try on the ocean’s surface. Liquid Robotics, an ocean data services company head-quartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., is leading the way for unmanned surface technologies in the oil and gas sector with its wave-pow-ered Wave Glider marine robot. The system can be deployed for a year or more using only solar power and waves as energy sources to collect oceanic and environmen-tal data.

According to Brian Anderson, vice presi-dent of oil and gas sales at Liquid Robotics, the company is currently working with BP to conduct flourometry analysis, which tests for and analyzes the refined and crude oil products and chlorophyll in the ocean. But this type of analysis is not the only work that the Wave Glider can tackle. Other appli-cations include ocean current monitoring, weather assessment, seismic data acquisi-tion, acoustics monitoring, marine ocean

life tracking and subsea-to-satellite gateway communications access, to name a few. All of these applications are critical for the oil and gas industry as it designs offshore installations, completes construction and maintains daily operations.

“Liquid Robotics is able to go out with a Wave Glider at a reasonable cost and conduct a comprehensive environmental acoustics study which provides an accurate picture of the ocean,” Anderson says. “This information helps the environmental regula-tors, the scientists and the oil companies by providing hard data for resource manage-ment.”

The potential cost effectiveness of AUVs is the main reason the oil and gas industry is gravitating toward the technology. Un-like ROVs that require a vessel to hold sta-tion during operations, AUVs and surface vehicles such as the Wave Glider are free to roam the ocean; for example, the Wave Glider can be controlled by a Web-based command and control system, making it truly a global ocean survey platform. AUVs are also able to conduct some missions much faster than tethered systems.

McCloud envisions that systems similar to the Marlin AUV will eventually stay at sea with home bases that would allow for bat-tery recharging. For these types of endur-ance operations, launch and retrieval ves-sels would rarely be needed.

“Ultimately the oil and gas industry is look-ing for vehicles that can live on the seabed and conduct vessel independent opera-tions,” says McLeod.

If the systems advance enough, vessel in-dependence would mean significant cost savings for the offshore oil and gas sector, among other important benefits. According to McLeod, a reduction in the number of ships supporting offshore operations would mean fewer people at sea, reduced opera-tional risks, lower energy consumption and a cleaner environment, and ultimately less cost to the operators. All of these are ben-

efits that would be positive for petroleum companies from a cost and public percep-tion standpoint.

It could be some time before AUVs and other unmanned maritime systems reach the point of vessel-independent operations. There are still challenges that will have to be overcome. Particularly, improvements in en-ergy and power will have to be achieved to ensure that underwater and surface technol-ogies can carry larger payloads, operate in strong ocean currents and remain on target for extensive periods of time to accomplish their mission. Once these advancements are achieved, few obstacles will stand in the way of unmanned surface and subsea technologies being the go-to systems for the offshore oil and gas sector. With more at-tention being placed on offshore operations than ever before, petroleum companies will continue to strive to remain competitive, compliant and environmentally conscious. Fortunately, the unmanned systems industry will be prepared with a variety of technolo-gies ready to lead the way.

Lindsay Voss is senior program develop-ment manager at AUVSI.

AUVs and unmanned surface vehicles, like Liquid Robotics’ Wave Glider, offer an added cost savings since they do not require manned vessel deployment. Photo courtesy Liquid Robotics.

2000

2005

2010

Maritime in motion

More than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, yet much of the depths of our oceans and freshwater bodies remain unexplored. Getting a manned vehicle to the greatest depths, battling water pressure and total darkness, is risky business. Now, autonomous underwater vehicles, or gliders, are literally taking researchers 20,000 leagues under

the sea. Their purposes range from cleaning up oil spills to tracking down treasure, but they give users a new perspective on Earth’s own final frontier.

tiMElinE

IRobot sends its Sea-glider UUV to the Gulf of Mexico to help with cleanup from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Seaglider moni-tored the area of the oil spill, looking for the level of dissolved oxygen and the presence of oil at depths of more than 3,000 feet.

2010

Kongsberg Maritime of Norway, builder of the Hugin family of under-water vehicles, acquires Massachusetts-based Hydroid, builder of the Remus family of AUVs.

2007

2003

The Slocum glider Scarlet Knight, named after the mascot of Rutgers University, wends its way from Tuckerton, N.J., to the coast of Spain, taking 221 days to travel 7,400 kilometers and becoming the star of the documentary “Atlantic Crossing: A Robot’s Daring Mission.”

2009An Explorer vehicle built by ISE lives up to its name and surveys 1,000 kilo-meters of under-ice Arctic water.

2010

In an April expedition, divers found the black box from Air France Flight 447, which crashed off the coast of Brazil in 2009, with the help of the Remus 6000 AUV.

2011

In November, Subsea 7 and SeeByte Ltd. successfully completed a pipeline inspection in the North Sea. Subsea 7’s GeoSub AUV and SeeByte’s Seetrack Offshore and its Autotracker module set a world record by inspecting more than 100 kilometers of pipelines with and AUV.

2006

Bluefin Robotics became a whol-ly owned subsidiary of the Bat-telle Memorial Institute. Battelle is a global science and technology company that develops and com-mercializes technology and man-ages laboratories.

2005


2000 1995 1990 1985 1980 19751965

2005

1970A group of engineers from MIT’s Autonomous Underwa-ter Vehicle Laboratory found Bluefin Robotics. Today, Blue-fin develops more than 80 AUV platforms, and more than 70 different sensors to go with them.

1997

Engineers at Rutgers LEO-15 ocean observatory cre-ate the first Remus AUV, an acronym for Remote Envi-ronmental Monitoring Units, equipped with sensors like an acoustic Doppler current profiler, a conductivity/tem-perature/depth profiler and a side-scan sonar.

1995

Douglas C. Webb, found-er of Webb Research, tests the first Slocum glid-er, named after Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world solo.

1991

Researchers at the Univer-sity of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory build SPURV, or Special Purpose Underwater Research Ve-hicle. It was one of the first AUVs. Researchers con-tinued to use the original SPURV, and four other mod-els, until 1979.

1957

The University of Washington builds SPURV II to study bal-listic missile submarine wakes. SPURV II could run for six hours and reach depths of up to 1,500 meters.

1973

A custom-designed Remus AUV swam below the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River in June to inspect a 45-mile stretch of the Delaware River aqueduct. The 15-hour survey resulted in 160 thousand digital photographs and 600 gigabytes of overall data.

2003

Canada’s International Submarine Engineering starts work on ARCS, its first autonomous underwater ve-hicle, which enters service in 1987 and is still active today, having car-ried out more than 800 dives.

1983

Bluefin Robotics became a whol-ly owned subsidiary of the Bat-telle Memorial Institute. Battelle is a global science and technology company that develops and com-mercializes technology and man-ages laboratories.

2005


L egend has it that whoever finds the tomb of the infamous warrior Genghis

Khan will trigger the destruction of Mon-golia. Questions still linger about how he died. Depending on the tale, Genghis Khan either passed from old age, a battle wound or a vial of poison. During his funeral pro-cession, his loyal followers even went so far as to slaughter anyone who crossed their path when transporting their leader to his final resting place, an unmarked patch of land in the hills of East Asia. The where-abouts of his tomb have remained a mys-tery for nearly a millennium.

Now, hundreds of years later, could these ancient forces have caused a UAV to crash near Mongolia’s northern border?

“We are not totally sure why it malfunc-

tioned at times, but it seemed like we had some radio interference that resulted in a shut down of controls and the UAV just lost power and fell,” Dr. Albert Yu-Lin, research scientist and emerging explorer for the Na-tional Geographic Society, says.

Lin and a team of researchers and students from the University of California San Diego used unmanned aerial vehicles to track the whereabouts of Genghis Khan’s tomb through noninvasive survey methods. A Na-tional Geographic special about the Valley of the Khans expedition aired on 9 Nov.

AcustomchopperResearchers used a custom-built multi-bladed remote controlled vehicle called the hexacopter. Previous attempts to use a

ready-made unmanned aircraft with fixed wings for exploration resulted in a lot of false starts and even more broken parts.

“We wanted to build our own platform to meet the needs of our exhibition,” Lin says. “We needed something that could break down very quickly, be thrown into a backpack, and then you could put it back together and then fly it in high wind condi-tions.”

Using off-the-shelf assembly pieces, Lin and a group of students built a UAV equipped with an array of cameras and sensors. It took to the air for the first time on 22 June, 2010. The team was able to get the hexa-copter from concept to reality with the help of the California Institute for Telecommu-nications and Information Technology, or

Any way the wind blowsUAVs explore everything from warriors to weather

BySTEPHANIELEVy

A student-built UAV roams Mongolia in the search for Genghis Khan’s tomb. Photo courtesy of Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, UCSD.

http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/content/forbidden-tomb-genghis-khan-airs-tonight-nov-9-9p-etpt


Calit2. Calit2 collaborates with engineers and innovators on University of California campuses to speed the production of new autonomous technologies through interdis-ciplinary collaboration.

The UAV’s two cameras, one that worked in visible light and one with an infrared spec-trum, could develop 3-D maps of archaeo-logical sites in real time. The hexacopter could withstand winds up to 30 mph, and in the event of a crash, the camera re-mained protected. An open-source network controlled much of the aircraft stabilization.

“The whole idea is that we can fly in rough conditions fairly quickly without needing to do a long process of calibration and put-ting it together and taking it apart,” says Lin.

Lin says one of the best applications of this technology on the Valley of the Khans proj-ect was when the team encountered a large structure. Ground perception of dimensions can only get an archaeologist so far. In a way, the UAV takes over the surveillance capabilities that a kite would not have in Mongolia’s rough terrain.

“Our conditions are pretty rugged,” he says. “We’re out in very, very remote condi-tions so it has to be field robust. If it crashes or if something happens we cannot depend on a RadioShack; we need to know we can field engineering solutions around it.”

But the Valley of the Khans project also de-pended on one of its most unique aspects: the students who are assisting in all aspects of research and development. Many of the participants are in the midst of postgradu-ate or postdoctoral study; there were even two undergraduates on the team.

Radley Angelo, the youngest member of the group, played the largest role in putting together the hexacopter. A third year under-graduate student at UCSD, Angelo had pre-vious experience with unmanned aircraft, conducting areal surveys of archaeological sites, and worked closely on data collection and organization.

“We’re connecting students with explora-tion at the National Geographic level that allows us to build tools like this for real-world exploration,” Lin says. “They’re building ro-botic camera traps; they’re building aerial GigaPan tools and aerial UAV multi-bladed

Aerial views of a potential archaeological site in Mongolia. Virtual explorers could mark roads, rivers and potential ancient structures. Photos courtesy of Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, UCSD.

rotocopters.”

Once the hexacopter acted as a scoping tool of the archaeological site, Lin and his colleagues utilized a litany of additional sensors they can use to survey the land. Lin says the team used the highest-grade satel-lites available on the market to get a literal view from space of the Mongolian land-scape. On the ground, Electro Resistivity Tomograpy (ERT) and ground penetrating radar (GPR) allowed researchers to “see” up to six meters underground. ERT uses a compact resistivity meter to investigate shal-low and deep targets. The GPR system is composed of seven antennas with a cen-ter frequency of 200 megahertz. It uses a STREAM (Swath Tomography Radar Equip-ment for Asset Mapping) system for archae-ological mapping. In the end, researchers used sensor data and off-the-shelf Trimble Total Station archers to create a cohesive visualization of the archaeological survey site.

ThehumanelementAfter the UAV and other sensors collected images of the archaeological site, the ex-


Air Exploration — continued from Page 31

plorers used another unique tool to ana-lyze their data: people sitting at home on their computers. Throughout the expedition, virtual explorers could access satellite im-ages from the mission online and then use digital markers to distinguish roads, rivers and modern or ancient structures. In Au-gust 2010, the expedition logged the one-millionth tag from a virtual explorer. In all, the Field Expedition: Mongolia homepage boasts more than 11,000 online explorers, who have processed more than 70 thou-sand images.

“From the air, from a birds-eye perspec-tive, you can see features you wouldn’t see on the ground,” Lin says. “You can see changes in vegetation; you can see differ-ent structures.”

These different structures ranged from the significant to the sheepish. In August 2010, base camp support specialist Luke Bar-rington noted that 10 virtual explorers had pointed out a cluster visible on one of the aerial photographs of the archaeological site. A series of black and white dots speck-

led the grassy landscape. No discovery is too small, so the team began to investi-gate. Barrington admits in his blog that he thought the markings could lead the team to an ancient burial site.

“While puzzling over this image, I hap-pened to glance out the door of our ger [Mongolian tent],” he writes. “As usual I could see sheep and goats wandering across the steppe, munching their way through the endless grassy plains. … That’s when it hit me — this was no ancient struc-ture, just a herd of sheep seen from space!”

“It’s pretty amazing what you can see from space,” Barrington says.

Unfortunately, in July 2010, this crowd-sourced information led the explorers on what would be a disappointing trek to “what looked like a circular mound sur-rounded by a few square formations,” Dr. Shay Har-Noy, computer vision engineer with Calit2 and UCSD, writes in a 29 July, 2010, blog. Even from a literal view of 30,000 feet, the structure had all the mark-

ings of a traditional ancient Mongolian burial site. The team’s excitement grew as they approached the newly discovered des-tination only to find the site had been looted three months prior. Locals say they saw a white Jeep pull up to the site in the dead of night, leaving an empty hole and strewn rocks by morning. They did not know what could be buried beneath the ancient tomb.

“It honestly broke my heart to see some-thing that had stood untouched for 3,000 years as a monument to Mongolian and world history just disappear because some-one thought they might find precious met-als,” he writes. “Now the world will never be able to learn anything from this site.”

ConqueringnewtechnologiesLin says he is looking to further develop the technologies on his team’s unmanned sys-tems. His wish list includes carbon dioxide sensors and Geiger counters, which have already been included in controlled aircraft tests.

“As the cost or the size of thermal cameras decreases, we’re going to try and look into putting those on different aerial platforms,” Lin says.

“We’ve sort of hit this point where off-the-shelf technology can be combined with a little bit of innovation, and tapping into some of these open-source communications that are taking this to the next level, and we can revolutionize the way we see the world,” Lin says.

Stephanie Levy is associate editor of Mission Critical.

For More information:http://albertyuminlin.com/index.php

http://www.calit2.net/index.php

The hexacopter gets ready for takeoff. The Valley of the Khans project started in June 2010 and wrapped up with a National Geographic special on 9 Nov.

http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/content/sad-discovery

http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/content/sad-discovery

http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/


NASA is develop-ing its Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment, or ATTREX,

program using the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle to explore the chemistry of the air in the Pacific Ocean around the equator. ATTREX is one of two Earth venture campaigns NASA is conducting with the UAVs. Test flights this fall tested the scientific tools on board the Global Hawk as well as the UAV’s operability.

“The air there has a great deal of influence over global weather patterns and weather in the U.S.,” David Fratello, payload manager for NASA’s Global Hawk Project, says (read more from Fratello, a “self-described flight guy,” in Q&A on Page 18). Cold air in the region, combined with changes in humidity, may have consequences for the climate that are comparable to the effects of greenhouse gases.

NASA received the Global Hawks from Northrop Grumman in 2010 and has since modified the UAVs with custom communications systems and an increased number of payload sensor locations.

“We’ve wired the airplane for a payload command and control communication system, specifically for payload operation during the flight,” Fratello says. “We’ve denigrated the big 48-inch satellite communication dish. … We use that strictly for payload.”

Originally, the U.S. Air Force flew the Global Hawk with just two payload sensor locations. Now, NASA added 11 new instruments to the system. For instance, the UAV will carry lidar, a solar reflectometer and a chemical analysis system. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration provided ozone instruments and a water vapor measuring mechanism. Of the instruments on board, seven are flying on the Global Hawk for the first time.

The University of Miami also provided a whole air sampler for Global Hawk. There are 90 air canisters loaded into the tail of the UAV that suck in air from the atmosphere during flight. Then the air is pressurized, sealed off and analyzed after landing.

ATTREX officially kicks off January 2013 from Dryden Flight Research Center in California for Pacific deployment. Operations will run for three years. If it’s successful, Fratello says NASA hopes to run future deployments in Guam and Australia.

For More information:http://espo.nasa.gov/

http://espo.nasa.gov/attrex/

Lin expects his team will be able to add new high-tech payloads to the hexacopter once the price of technology goes down. Photo courtesy of Peter Cottle.

UAVs weather the storm

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“The extensive waiting period has driven some UAS end users to fly their aircraft without the appropriate certifications,” says the report. “These uncertified operations pose a safety risk and could create addi-tional challenges for the UAS community.”

Across the pond, the United Kingdom’s Civ-il Aviation Authority has approved segre-gated airspace for unmanned systems, but this space is solely for testing new systems and not for missions. The CAA also makes size distinctions for what constitutes a UAS and also has a separate set of rules for fly-ing model aircraft.

In addition to policy regulations, unmanned aerial systems face a sometimes-skeptical public when it comes to privacy concerns.

On 15 December, the American Civil Lib-erties Union released a report on the use of UAVs and gave its recommendations for government use of the systems. Called “Pro-tecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft,” the report states, “Based on current trends — technology develop-ment, law enforcement interest, political and industry pressure, and the lack of legal safeguards — it is clear that drones pose

a looming threat to Americans’ pri-vacy.”

The ACLU anticipates possible Supreme Court action with UAVs and the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a warrant supported by probable cause for law enforcement interdic-tion. While there are some court cases that deal with manned aircraft and the Fourth Amendment, the ACLU anticipates that further rulings will be necessary because of the special uses of unmanned systems.

The ACLU recommends that there are strict usage restrictions on the systems, including prohibition of “indiscriminate mass surveillance,” which could be a dif-ficult line to draw, especially in longer-term exploration uses.

It recommends image retention restrictions and public notice of the UAVs’ flights. It also would like auditing and effective tracking of the systems, which would track the use of UAVs by government so citizens can tell how and how often the systems are being used and determine if they are being flown in “improper or expanded purposes.”

Another difficult hurdle is the organization’s recommendation for a “democratic control” system. “Deployment and policy decisions surrounding UAVs should be democrati-cally decided based on open information — not made on the fly by police depart-ments simple by virtue of federal grants or other autonomous purchasing decisions or departmental policy fiats.”

Banning the use of UAS from federal grants would particularly affect the exploration community, which is largely academic and relies on grants for funding.

UnCannY VallEY

Like much of the unmanned sys-tems industry, exploration-related efforts are bound by the laws of

the land — or in this case, the sky.

While the larger tier unmanned aer-ial vehicles involved in research will likely remain a government asset be-cause of their price tag, smaller UAVs would be proliferated in the United States and abroad if the governing bodies ruling the skies would allow access to that airspace.

The Federal Aviation Administration was supposed to rule on small UAS in early 2012, but in early Decem-ber the administration revealed that it would remain mum a little longer. The FAA plans on releasing the notice of proposed rulemaking for SUAS in spring 2012. The process that initiated the ruling dates back to 2009.

In an AUVSI report, entitled “UAS Integra-tion into the NAS: Impact on Job Growth,” the association reports that while integra-tion in early 2012 was feasible, “Micro, miniature and small UAS integration efforts are likely to be fully realized by 2015.” For larger systems, access to the National Airspace System “will likely not be realizes in this decade unless integration efforts are accelerated.” The report’s best estimate for integration of systems large and small plac-es the turning point around 2025.

Meanwhile, the numbers of companies and organizations that would like a piece of that airspace continues to grow. In 2007, less than 100 certificate of authorization re-quests were made to the FAA for unmanned flights, according to the FAA and the Gov-ernment Accountability Office. The number steadily grew in the following years, reach-ing more than 150 in 2008, 250 in 2009 and 350 in 2010.

To boldly go where they’re allowed

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

020

09

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

UAS Jobs Created by NAS Integration

UAS Jobs Created by NAS Integration

Source: Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International

http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/report-protecting-privacy-aerial-surveillance-recommendations-government-use

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Ask any engineer and they’ll tell you: Testing is key in developing any type of robot.

Though many domains have their challeng-es, it’d be pretty easy to argue that the guys at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have a behemoth task at hand — recreating and readying robotics for the environment of space.

Started in the 1930s as a test bed for rocket propulsion, the Jet Propulsion Lab is home to about 5,000 employees that have per-fected rockets and robots for the long jour-ney to outer space.

JPL has both indoor and outdoor test facili-ties as its proving grounds.

“We actually can test all phases of the mission. We have simulations that help us launch the vehicle, run through our cruise scenarios, run through our EDL [entry, de-scent and landing] scenarios and of course through surface operation,” says Eric Agui-lar, system integration and test lead team at the lab for the Mars Science Laboratory program. “With that we have different test beds with different levels of hardware fidel-ity. For instance like GNC [guidance and navigation control] sensors, primary avion-ics boxes, central computers, again with simulations also working around that too. And then … we do all the testing in the test bed first prior to doing anything on the flight vehicle.”

The outdoor area, called the Mars Yard, is a 21-by-22-meter area of soil carefully craft-ed from beach sand, decomposed granite, brick dust and volcanic cinders to seem like Mars dust. The lab, now in its second itera-tion, has Mars-like rocks — that, although the same size, have different density from their Red Planet counterparts — that are scattered at about the same ratio. Outdoor testing provides not only a Mars-like land-scape, but also the chance to test the robots in natural lighting conditions.

It was at this lab that the now famous Spirit and Opportunity rovers were put through the paces before their summer 2003 launches to land on Mars.

tEstinG, tEstinG

When it really is rocket science

A 2003 photo of technicians removing one of the circuit boards on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Photo courtesy NASA/JPL/KSC.

Unlike other kinds of robotics, NASA relies on replica systems — with differing weights to account for gravity on each planet — to continually run tests while the rovers are de-ployed. This can sometimes run long after the expected end of the mission, as was the case with the Mars Exploration Rover pro-gram. The program, originally slated to last for three months, is still ongoing.

The lab also developed unique imaging technology to aid in rover situation recon-struction, called Virtual Presence in Space technology. It combines special effects, like those that would be found in a Hollywood film, with images a rover has taken while deployed. The scientists use the tracks of the robots present in these photos to over-lay an image of one of the test rovers, cre-ating a panoramic image of the rover on Mars. Aside from providing awe-inspiring photographs, JPL’s website says the photos “can be useful to mission teams in planning exploration by enhancing perspective and a sense of scale.”

Maintaining these test rovers to recreate on Earth the different situations the MER ro-bots encounter on Mars became key when Spirit, the first of the two rovers to deploy, got stuck in some very soft Martian sand in 2009. The lab poured months of testing into using different materials to mimic Mars’

soil and attempting maneuvers to get the vehicle unstuck.

JPL’s attempts were delayed because of a computer server disk crash and the search for a similarly soft material to drive over. Both issues were remedied within a month of the rover’s immobility.

Despite the tests, the rover proved too stuck to mediate, and NASA changed its mission in January 2010 to a stationary one.

Not long after, in late March, NASA’s planned attempt to communicate with the rover went silent, the agency attributing it to the robot entering a low-power hibernation mode. On 25 May 2011, NASA decided to end contact efforts to Spirit.

“We basically did most of what we could do over the last year, roughly, to try and get in touch with the vehicle,” says Jake Matijevic, who worked on the Mars Exploration Rover program for eight years before transition-ing to the Mars Science Laboratory team. “The likelihood is, given the circumstances in which the vehicle was forced to be in once it got stuck in the terrain, [it] means that it couldn’t produce enough energy to keep itself warm [and] probably caused a problem with the battery systems, and we really needed the batteries to make com-munication possible. I don’t think there’s a resurrection, if you will, of the spacecraft. If there were, it would have already hap-pened this year.”

A panoramic view of the Mars Yard, JPL’s outdoors terrain simulation of Mars. Photo courtesy NASA JPL.

A synthetic image of Spirit created using the Jet Propulsion Lab’s Virtual

Presence in Space technology. The process combines a photorealistic

model of the rover and with images taken by Spirit and using special

effects combines the images so the rover matches the track marks that appear in the photographs. Image

courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.



In the end, an epic battle ensues between Auto and the ship’s human captain, with a little help from WALL-E, after it becomes ap-parent that Auto is intentionally keeping the Axiom from returning to Earth. Auto doesn’t want to return to Earth because, he says, “On the Axiom, we will survive.” That’s not good enough for the captain, who retali-ates “I don’t want to survive! I want to live!” Finally, the captain shuts down Auto and charts a course back to Earth for the robots and people to work together to clean up the mess.

‘2001:ASpaceOdyssey’Stanley Kubrik’s “epic drama of adventure and exploration” — the movie’s tagline — introduces us to HAL, the precursor to WALL-E’s Auto. HAL, the ship’s computer, runs most of the operations of the Jupiter mission. HAL starts off as a charismatic computerized counterpart to Drs. David Bowman and Frank Poole; he charms audi-ences in an early interview with the BBC.

But when things start to go wrong on the spaceship, HAL chalks it up to “human er-ror.” Concerned that HAL may be wrong, Bowman and Poole sneak away to talk without the computer overhearing them. They both have a “bad feeling” about HAL, but decide to heed his commands. The as-tronauts agree to deactivate the computer if it proves to be wrong, but what they don’t know is HAL is reading their lips through a window.

HAL exacts his revenge on the astronauts. He cuts off oxygen to Poole and sends him adrift in space. Bowman, not realizing HAL is responsible, gets in a pod to rescue Poole, leaving his helmet behind. While he’s gone, HAL terminates the life functions of the crew in suspended animation. When

Boldly goingPoP CUltUrE CornEr

‘WALL-E’After humans have made a mess of Earth, mega-company Buy n’ Large promotes space as “the final fun-tier” for people looking to escape the clutter. The Axiom, a giant automated ship that ferried people away from Earth, comes equipped with ro-bots to take care of your every need, but none are so sinister as Auto, the robotic au-topilot charting the Axiom’s course through its journey in space. Auto has taken full con-trol of the ship, moving it farther and farther into the depths of space, while generations of passengers on board become obese, im-mobile and completely reliant on robots to serve them.

As WALL-E travels to the Axiom on a rocket ship, we get a few clues as to where the Axiom has traveled. WALL-E gets up close and personal with one of Saturn’s iridescent rings, encounters what looks like a giant nebula as he leaves our solar system. He eventually reaches the Axiom somewhere in deep space.

‘Transformers:DarkoftheMoon’The conclusion of Michael Bay’s “Transform-ers” trilogy didn’t just explore his dearth of directing talent or the consequences of co-opting a Pink Floyd album without permis-sion. Instead of humans building robots to explore space, astronauts go into space to investigate an unmanned spacecraft that has crashed on the dark side of the moon. This, according to the movie, is the real rea-son we went to the moon in the ‘60s.

The mysterious ship is the Ark, a spacecraft from Cybertron carrying an invention that could end the conflict between the benevo-lent Autobots and the evil Decepticons, the two types of robots that have been (loudly) battling it out in the first two movies. The movie turns into a race between the Auto-bots and Decepticons to reach the Ark and to manipulate it for good or evil.

Sadly, the series’ most popular robot, Me-gan Fox, did not make an appearance in this flick.

Just so no lawyers get involved, this is not an uncredited photo of WALL-E. But to demonstrate how much people like the little guy, the team from Blue-field State College, W.Va., dressed their robot like him in the 2010 AUVSI Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. AUVSI photo.


Bowman returns to the ship with Poole’s body, HAL refuses to let him in, arguing that his plan to deactivate the computer system jeopardizes the mission. Bowman does eventually get into the spacecraft to deactivate HAL. HAL first tries to reassure Bowman, then pleads with him to stop, and finally begins to express fear — all in a steady monotone voice — before Bowman finally deactivates the computer.

‘StarTrek:TheNextGeneration’Boldly going where no man, or robot, had gone before, Lt. Cmdr. Data was a human-oid robot on board the Starship Enterprise. Designed and built by Dr. Noonien Soong, Data serves as the second officer aboard the Enterprise. His brain is a central com-puter system, which contributes to his im-pressive computational abilities. He also had a storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits and a total linear computational speed of 60 trillion operations per second.

Unlike most robots commonly shown in TV or movies, Data eventually receives chip that allows him to feel human emotion. Over the course of the series, Data became more and more “human-like” without ever fully fitting in with his human comrades aboard the Enterprise. He is eventually de-clared an autonomous individual, instead of being Starfleet property, but this uncanny valley made for some poignant, and often humorous, scenes. The writers used this plot point to show an “outsider’s” perspective on humanity.

‘StarTrek:TheMotionPicture’It’s difficult to talk about science and ex-ploration without at least a couple of Star Trek references. The first Star Trek movie hit screens in 1979, telling the story of a men-acing space presence that was destroying Klingon and Federation spaceships alike as it drew closer to Earth.

The culprit turned out to be a device named V’Ger, which just wants to be reunited with

An image of Voyager 2, which is now busy making its way out of the solar system. Hope-fully it won’t being sentient and destructive like the fictional Voyager 6 from the movie.

its creator and is frustrated when it doesn’t get a response. As it turns out, V’Ger is ac-tually Voyager 6, one of NASA’s old space probes, which apparently traveled through a black hole, received some memory up-grades from other machines, gained its own intelligence and decided to return to its maker to complete its mission and share its knowledge.

The movie’s producers were perhaps a bit optimistic about NASA’s planetary science budget; it only built two Voyager space-craft, both of which launched in 1977. Voyager 1 became the most-distant human-made object in space in 1998, and both spacecraft are nearing interstellar space (where no spacecraft, let alone man, has gone before). Future Capt. Kirks may have to deal with the Voyagers should they re-turn.

‘Airplane II: The Sequel’Sometimes a mission to the moon can lead to rogue spaceflight, crash landings and a serious drinking problem. Just ask Ted Strik-er, the lead character in Airplane II: The Sequel, a riotous follow-up to (what else) “Airplane.” In the sequel, a crew is prepar-ing to fly the maiden voyage of Mayflower One, a lunar shuttle with an autopilot sys-tem called ROC, to a space station already built on the moon. All the while, Ted is on his own autopilot mission to win back the love of his life, Elaine Dickinson, who works on the plane.

Things get out of hand pretty quickly when Mayflower One short circuits, causing ROC to go insane and chart the ship’s course to fly into the sun. Three of the flight crewmem-bers try and disable ROC and save the ship, but they meet their own grisly ends. Soon, it’s up to Ted Striker to save the day and wrestle control from the computer.

On the ground, the air traffic controller working with Mayflower One discovers that one of the passengers, played by the late Sonny Bono, has brought a bomb on the plane. But it’s not as scary as it sounds. Striker actually uses the bomb to blow up ROC. Ultimately, Mayflower One lands on the moon as a manned system. But we’ll let that slide.

‘20,000LeaguesUndertheSea’But enough about space. Jules Verne’s clas-sic adventure tale, published in 1870, spins a yarn about a highly advanced subma-rine, the Nautilus, captained by the mysteri-ous Capt. Nemo.

Scientist Pierre Aronnax and the harpoon-thrower Ned Land are part of an expedition to kill what is thought to be a sea monster, which instead is revealed as the Nautilus. Nemo takes them aboard and proceeds to show them the world, or at least the un-derwater part of it. They wander far afield, from the Red Sea to Antarctica, and even wander about on the bottom in special suits.

The Nautilus is a marvel, specially outfit-ted for marine biology studies, but Nemo is not much of a people person and wants to keep the protagonists hostage. He has vowed never to rejoin the human world, but Aronnax feels that old publish-or-perish pull and wants to get off the ship — even cutting-edge science and exploration gets old after a while, apparently. If only Nemo had thought to employ ROVs or AUVs on his sub, maybe his guests would have stuck around.


One of the biggest challenges facing the use of underwater vehicles, and sometimes ground vehicles, is commu-

nication. Air waves have proven to be ro-bust carriers of information; water is much more difficult, and traveling underground sometimes renders land communications tricky as well.

Water absorbs and scatters com-munications waves, and the ground can block or echo them, making communications difficult or impossible, at least at high speeds.

There are several ways to get around these problems. One is tethering, as is used with remotely operated vehicles underwater and some unmanned ground vehicles for certain applications.

The team from the Center for Ro-bot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), for instance, has teth-ered ground robots as part of its toolkit and made use of them in surveying the damaged Japanese nuclear plant at Fukishima Dai-ichi. And ROVs used around the world, including by the oil and gas industry, rely on tethers.

Tethers are a twofer solution: They can provide both communication at high data rates and power, both of which are critical when you’re sending robots thou-sands of feet underwater or hundreds of feet down a mine shaft.

For some uses, though, fully autonomous, untethered vehicles are more desirable, for their range and flexibility, even if using them means operators have to put up with spotty communications. Once you’ve gone that way, however, you’re again suffering with the fact that seawater makes communi-cations difficult.

Not every program will be able to create such an infrastructure, however, so work continues on technologies to at least ease the communications burden. WFS Defense markets technologies that use radio fre-quency communications for both sea-going systems and land systems.

The company’s Seatext RF system is being used in the Chesapeake Bay to provide wireless com-munication capability from sen-sors based on the bay floor to a WatchKeeper buoy built by AXYS Technologies.

The Seatext modem in the bay transmits data through water rang-ing from 5 meters deep to 50 meters deep at data rates of up to 100 bits per second. They are used to transmit data about water quality on the bottom, where the state of Maryland is trying to re-store oyster beds.

Another company looking to bol-ster communications, at least on the ground side, is Cobham. The company conducted a series of demonstrations of its coded or-thogonal frequency division mul-tiplexing (COFDM) technology in 2008 through 2010, showing how the technology could dramati-

cally extend the range of ground vehicles, improving their ability to work in culverts, pipes or in the interiors of buildings.

The company has now purchased Germa-ny’s Telerob, maker of the tEODor (Telerob Explosive Ordnance Disposal and observa-tion robot) and TeleMAX, a smaller, lighter platform with flexible treads and a robotic arm, giving it more platforms to demon-strate its COFDM systems.

Communications can be key underground, underwatertECHnoloGY GaP

Talking underwaterAUVs can communicate underwater, but at higher bandwidths they are limited to distances measured in tens of meters. The ways to get around this have traditionally been by surfacing the vehicles and using antennas to report back or using acoustic modems to send data via buoys.

While advances are being made in radio frequency communications and even things like lasers, William Porter, the former presi-dent and CEO of WFS Defense says, “The cure will always be a mix of things.”

One major new initiative, the Ocean Ob-servatories Initiative, is using an array of devices, including an undersea cable, to get data back from fixed ocean platforms and autonomous undersea vehicles and gliders (for more on the OOI, see the story on Page 7).

A map of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which will make heavy use of cabling for undersea communications. Photo courtesy OOI.


Laser beams and transducersSome companies are looking to more exotic means of com-munication, mainly for submarines, although that could filter down to smaller unmanned systems as well if the technology is proven.

ITT Corp. is working on using laser communication with satel-lites that would allow submarines to talk at high bandwidth while remaining below the thermocline layer, thus avoiding detection. The system would use “quantum keys” to avoid signal cracking by outside enemies while still allowing a sub-marine to transmit data over the laser.

According to Popular Science, any attempt to intercept the photons would alert the sender. However, there’s much work to be done, as the photons must be able to pass through the water without also disturbing the security of the stream, and satellites must be able to receive and relay such signals.

BAE Systems has also been working the submarine communi-cations issue in recent years, although in a different way. The company has demonstrated a through-hull communications system that does away with the need to drill holes in the sides of submarines for communications equipment.

Instead, using two acoustic transducers, the company has shown it can send signals through several inches of solid steel. This is not only applicable to submarines, but to ar-mored vehicles, pipes and other systems, the company says.

And, while it doesn’t get the signal much beyond the subma-rine or the armored vehicle, it does help with communica-tions, the company says, in its application for a U.S. patent filed in 2010.

“In an application of the present invention when applied to submarine hulls, underwater communication points may be provided at various places over the outside of the hull to en-able, e.g. short-range RF or optical communication between external vehicles or divers in the water outside the submarine and equipment or people inside it,” the application says.

“For example, a transponder may be linked to the through-hull communications link as provided by the present inven-tion to enable remote control of an underwater vehicle from within the submarine or to download data gathered by the underwater vehicle when it moves to within communicating range of the transponder. The broadband nature of the con-nection through the hull provided by the present invention seems particularly attractive in its ability to rapidly download or exchange significant quantities of data with a remote ve-hicle or diver or an underwater beacon in a very short time.”

WFS Defense’s Seatext system, shown here at the Undersea Defense Technology 2009 show. AUVSI photo.


David Clague is a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research In-stitute (MBARI) who makes extensive

use of an autonomous underwater vehicle to study submarine volcanoes.

Indeed, he says, AUV technology and prac-tices spearheaded by MBARI now make it easier to study volcanoes under the sea than ones on land.

“For years, I wanted to drain the water out and see what they [volcanoes] were do-ing,” he tells Mission Critical. “Now I’d like to sink ‘em and see what they’re doing.”

Clague began his career studying under-water volcanoes, but it proved difficult to do because the technology was not good enough in the 1970s and 1980s. He later returned to it and began working with AUV technology in about 2006, fine-tuning both technology and operations along the way.

“It’s a long process. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, and they do,” he says.

Most researchers using AUVs “fly” them over flat, muddy sea bottoms. That doesn’t work for volcano studies.

“We fly the vehicles through very rough terrain, up very steep slopes, through very sharp changes in slope,” he says. “Pretty much every mission we do now is pushing our capability to actually deploy in more and more rugged terrain. When we start-ed, we were flying higher off the bottom to avoid some of these problems. Now, to in-crease resolution, we’re flying at 50 meters above the bottom.”

Pushing the underwater envelope hasn’t been easy. “We collected a few samples from the bottom in the beginning,” he says with a laugh.

Clague maps underwater lava flows, mak-ing geological maps of the ocean floor. Aboveground volcano eruptions of basalt

volcanoes are all pretty similar to each other, he says.

“These are not. Eruption rates vary greatly; eruption durations vary by at least several orders of magnitude.”

In the past, studying the flows would be done from ships and remotely operated vehicles would do “ground truthing.” That could take 15-20 ROV dives.

“We now make a map — that usually takes us a day or two — and then we’ll put may-

UUVs and the brimstone belowEnD UsErs

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be three dives on it to ground-truth the map. We can actually make a map that says the flow boundaries are here, here and here.”

That cuts down on the number of samples needed for study, which cuts down on the lab work, which cuts down on expenses, he says.

“It saves a lot of money, and we end up with a much better product. … The AUV makes everything much easier; it’s much easier to plan what you’re doing, much easier to see what you’re doing. We can collect higher

resolution data underwater than anybody can collect on land [over volcanoes],” he says.

This was in evidence this summer, when the AUV created a new map of a lava flow from the Axial Seamount, an active volcano about 270 kilometers off the coast of Or-egon. An ROV dive noted that the seafloor had changed as they refreshed instruments, and the AUV was able to map the new floor, now under one to 15 meters of fresh lava, in just a couple of days.

MBARI was established in 1987 by David Packard and is located in Moss Landing, Calif., on Monterey Bay. Its mission is to de-velop better instruments, systems and meth-ods for studying ocean waters. The institute pioneered the use of mapping gear on AUVs, Clague says, including multi-beam mapping systems and side-scan sonar, sys-tems that have now found their way onto commercial and military AUVs.

The institute currently has one mapping AUV, the D. Allen B., named in honor of longtime institute board member D. Allen Bromley of Yale University, who died in 2004.

The institute is building a second mapping vehicle now, Clague says, partly to make more efficient use of the institute’s ships. Other AUVs include one that makes chemi-cal and biologic measurements in the up-per water, and a long-range AUV that can survey the upper water for up to a month. A combination mapping and video imaging AUV and another to do midwater biologic transects using video are under develop-ment.

David Clague, MBARI

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