The 1997 Antarctic Field Expedition of the Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search project has completed, and field testing of the panoramic camera in Antarctic conditions has brought home lots of experience and gigabytes of data for analysis. The panoramspheric camera may be used in the future for several purposes. Some potential uses include Landmark Based Navigation and Skyline Based Position Estimation, which are discussed in this document, and also sun tracking, which is discussed elsewhere. An ASCII report on the performance of the panoramic camera is available online.

Landmark Based Navigation:

Thirteen sequences of images were taken in three locations to use for testing natural feature tracking and landmark based navigation. The sequences came from the Independence Hills moraine, Patriot Hills moraine, and CMU camp.

Animated Data

Skyline Based Position Estimation:

A series of images were taken in the valley between Patriot and Independence Hills. These images are tagged with position ground truth. Each image was taken 500 meters or more from adjacent image locations, in a rough grid shape. The images will be used for landmark based position estimation and for skyline based position estimation tests. One image is shown below.

Click for larger image

More of the series of images will be made available here shortly.

Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites 1997 All material on this page is property of NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. Any image or text taken from this site and pasted into any other document without consent violates the Copyright Law of the United States and the Berne International Copyright Agreement. Send comments, questions, or suggestions to: meteorite-info@ri.cmu.edu This document prepared by Matthew Deans