Abstract
By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Robotics & Machine Learning Daily News Daily News-A new study on robotics is now availab le. According to news reporting out of Pasadena, California, by NewsRx editors, research stated, "Ice worlds are at the forefront of astrobiological interest be cause of the evidence of subsurface oceans." Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from California Institut e of Technology: "Enceladus in particular is unique among the icy moons because there are known vent systems that are likely connected to a subsurface ocean, th rough which the ocean water is ejected to space. An existing study has shown tha t sending small robots into the vents and directly sampling the ocean water is l ikely possible. To enable such a mission, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is de veloping a snake-like robot called Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) that c an navigate Enceladus' extreme surface and descend an erupting vent to capture u naltered liquid samples and potentially reach the ocean. However, navigating to and through Enceladus' environment is challenging: Because of the limitations of existing orbital reconnaissance, there is substantial uncertainty with respect to its geometry and the physical properties of the surface/vents; communication is limited, which requires highly autonomous robots to execute the mission with limited human supervision. Here, we provide an overview of the EELS project and its development effort to create a risk-aware autonomous robot to navigate these extreme ice terrains/environments. We describe the robot's architecture and the technical challenges to navigate and sense the icy environment safely and effec tively."
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