Roving in the snow

Scientists are diligently working to understand how and why the world’s ice shelves are melting. Unfortunately, the locations in question are volatile ice sheets, possibly cracking, shifting and filling with water - not exactly a safe environment for scientists.

To help scientists collect the more detailed data they need without risking scientists’ safety, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Pennsylvania State University, have designed robots called SnoMotes to traverse these potentially dangerous ice environments.

The SnoMotes work as a team, autonomously collaborating among themselves to cover all the necessary ground to gather assigned scientific measurements. Data gathered by the Snomotes could give scientists a better understanding of the important dynamics that influence the stability of ice sheets.

'Our goal was to create rovers that could gather more accurate data to help scientists create better climate models,' said Ayanna Howard, lead on the project and an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.