Autonomous robotic meteorite identification in Antarctica
L. Pedersen, M. Wagner, Dimitris J. Apostolopoulos, William “Red” Whittaker · 2002
This paper describes the development and implementation of a Bayes network based system for distinguishing terrestrial rocks from meteorites from onboard the mobile robotic rover Nomad. Equipped with a color camera and spectrometer, Nomad autonomously made the first robotic identification of a meteorite, in January 2000 at the Elephant Moraine, Antarctica. This paper discusses rock classification from a robotic platform and the challenges of autonomously obtaining good sensor data in the field, while focusing on Nomad implementation.