The first Endurance, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton in 1912, was crushed in the ice flows in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica, but the entire crew survived and was rescued in 1916.
UT ME Graduate Student to spend two months working on a robotics project in Antarctica
UT ME Ph.D. student Shilpa Gulati stands in front of ENDURANCE, the robot, on Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, where some of the testing was done.
AUSTIN, TEXAS—November 6, 2008
Shilpa Gulati's Excellent Adventure
Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student Shilpa Gulati has embarked on a two-month adventure to Antarctica to map the topography of a perennially ice-covered lake West Lake Bonney. The nine-member team plans to measure temperature, electrical conductivity, ambient light, chlorophyll-a, Dissolved Organic Matter, pH and redox of the water column in the entire lake using an underwater robot named ENDURANCE (Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic ANtarctic Explorer). The robot will also perform visible imaging of the benthic microbial mats, other lake bottom materials, lake ice bottom and the glacier contact.
ENDURANCE, invented by Stone Aerospace
The robot ENDURANCE has been developed by an Austin-based company Stone Aerospace, owned by Dr. William Stone. Gulati learned about this project through her advisor Dr. Ben Kuipers, and has been involved in software development and field testing of the robot for more than a year. The software for ENDURANCE builds upon earlier code written by Carnegie Mellon University for DepthX, a predecessor to ENDURANCE.
Development Goals
The robot is developed for NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) Program and is intended to develop and demonstrate concepts to explore the ice-covered surface Jupiter's moon Europa two decades from now. The robot is being specifically designed to minimize impact on the environment it is working in. This is primarily to meet strict Antarctic environmental protocols, but will also be a useful feature for planetary protection and improved planetary science in the future. Prior to testing in Antarctica, ENDURANCE underwent testing in a quarry in Austin, Texas, the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Facility at Johnson Space Center, and at Lake Mendota in Wisconsin.
Shilpa Gulati and Professor Ben Kuipers
with the robotic wheelchair.
Gulati's Research
Ms. Gulati is pursuing her Ph.D. with advisors Dr. Ben Kuipers who heads the Qualitative Reasoning Research Group in Computer Sciences, and Dr. Raul Longoria who heads the System Modeling and Experimentation Research Group in Mechanical Engineering. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay before coming to the University of Texas at Austin. Her Ph.D. work is derived from Dr. Ben Kuipers' autonomous wheelchair research and investigates how an autonomous robot, acting in unstructured environments, can learn to perform a variety of motion tasks while dealing with changes in the environment and its own body.Gulati will be producing a blog to document her experiences, which she invites everyone to read.