蘑菇Av

Expertise

Topics:聽 Robotics, Exploration, Mapping, Autonomy

Industries: Computer Software, Computer Hardware

David Wettergreen creates robots that explore and conduct field experiments in polar climates, deserts, underwater caverns, and volcanic craters. He has led numerous research projects, including a decade of robotic investigation of microbial life in the Atacama Desert, which established single-command, multi-kilometer, autonomous science investigation. His work in science autonomy enables robotic explorers to detect, classify, and evaluate geologic and biologic features to autonomously interpret and act upon their scientific observations. This work applies to space exploration and to applications in agriculture, forestry, ecology, and marine science. Dr. Wettergreen is a Research Professor at the Robotics Institute of 蘑菇Av, where he chairs the Robotics Ph.D. program. He has advised 48 graduate students (16 Ph.D.) and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. Dr. Wettergreen obtained a Ph.D. in Robotics in 1995 from Carnegie Mellon and then conducted post-doctoral research at NASA Ames Research Center (1996-97) and was a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (1998-2000). He is an Associate Editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics and has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers. He is co-founder of Mesh Robotics, which provides autonomous driving capability for off-road vehicles.

Media Experience

CMU Leaves Marks on Mars 听鈥�聽蘑菇Av
The partnership has created a pathway into the high bay in CMU's Gates Center for Computer Science. For years, students led by Robotics Institute Research Professor David Wettergreen (pictured at left) have tested wheels for rovers that have explored Mars. [...] "We did extensive tests to determine a baseline for design of the Perseverance wheel," said Wettergreen. "JPL tasked us with increasing the tractive performance 鈥� the slope climbing 鈥� and durability without increasing the wheel's mass."

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鈥淥ne of the fundamental constraints of any kind of space exploration 鈥� whether you鈥檙e going to Mars or Europa or the moon 鈥� is that you have limited bandwidth, which means a limit on the amount of information you can send back and forth,鈥� David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 Robotics Institute, told Recode. 鈥淒uring the periods of time when the robot can鈥檛 communicate, autonomy is important for it to enable it to keep doing tasks, to explore on its own, to make progress, rather than just sitting there waiting for the next time it hears from us.鈥�

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"Errors in properly grounding circuits can lead to really strange symptoms that initially appear unrelated to the root cause," David Wettergreen, a roboticist at 蘑菇Av in Pittsburgh, told IEEE Spectrum. "It can take a long time to debug because the problem is not easily reproducible and may not occur often, or even in the same way every time," said Wettergreen, who specializes in autonomous robots for planetary exploration. [In Photos: Robonaut 2, NASA's Robot Butler for Astronauts]

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Zo毛 is explicitly designed to search for signs of microbial life, which experts say would likely exist well below the Martian surface. "Direct evidence of life, if it exists, is more likely underground, beyond the current reach of rovers," David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, said in a statement earlier this month. "Chances improve with greater depth but we are first developing one-meter capability and integrating with a mobile robot."

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"Scientifically, the study helps us understand how life survives in extreme environments with implications to both Earth and Mars," said David Wettergreen, research professor in Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 Robotics Institute and principal investigator for the Life in the Atacama project. "Technologically, we are learning about the mechanisms and the algorithms that will enable us to explore the subsurface of other planets." [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]