Solar-Powered Robot Used For Snow-Surfing

When researchers at the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College are not busy creating "scalable, solar-powered, science platforms for the Antarctic", they take their robots out for a bit of snow-surfing. Check some of their cool autonomous solar robots under development. The fellow pictured above with the laptop is snow-surfing at about 5 mph. Here's a quote from the team:

One morning, while taking walking behind the robot and dragging a sled of equipment for quantitatively measuring the strength and cohesion of the snow underfoot, we realized what fools we were to man-haul the equipment ourselves. And, for that matter, how silly even to walk. So, we hooked the sled to the robot and went for a ride. The robot, it turns out, can haul its own weight (nearly 200 lbs.) on a sled and hardly notice it...Snow surfing behind the robot is not very exciting however; it only travels at a slow walking pace.

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