Cool Robots at Dartmouth College

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All in all, not a bad day. Sundays are leisurely here at Summit. Many of the staff have the day off. For researchers, though, especially those here for a brief few weeks, it is business (nearly) as usual. Although we probably had every intension to get started on the day's work around 8, as we usually do, Jim and I had a laid back breakfast, enjoying the conversation with a few of the staffers here. As it was, we didn't get to the robot until nearly 10. I'd say that's a fine way to do things. Still, 10 a.m. put Jim and I in a minority of folks doing anything work related today. A number of folks, after lunch, took a quick trip to the old GRIP drill site - where one of the more publicized deep ice core samples was dug up a number of years ago. I spent the morning partly familiarizing myself with the code behind the GPS navigation system and, in one or two places, tweaking it a bit. This is a bit of the project that, unlike my solar power system, has been proven in full up tests in the past. Although we know that it works, a few changes elsewhere in the overall program forced me to reexamine it a bit. This took the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. Jim, meanwhile, was quite patiently and meticulously pouring over the data that we'd gathered during the driving tests yesterday. These data, and data that we have gathered in the previous few days, indicate that the robot has a tremendously low internal drivetrain resistance, and a quite low rolling resistance, even over soft snow. It is a credit to the hard work of all the project members from these past two years. Eventually, we were able to take the robot out and see if it could find its way. We had tried this yesterday, with limited success. Our first time or two out we encountered the same result: the robot seemed to ignore the first waypoint given to it, and try to make directly for the second one instead. Also, while Jim and I managed to get the robot's motors balanced a few days ago, it still lists to the right when driving at 100% speed. We were able to overcome these problems with a little more code hacking, so that the robot was able to actually drive from some starting point, to point A, to point B, then stop and await further instructions. Tomorrow we will set it on a roundabout course on the LC-130's turnaround space, a trip of perhaps 2 km. All in all, not bad for a Sunday afternoon. --Alex Streeter
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