Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13 (NIPS 2000)
Liam Pedersen, Dimitrios Apostolopoulos, William Whittaker
A Bayes network based classifier for distinguishing terrestrial rocks from meteorites is implemented onboard the Nomad robot. Equipped with a camera, spectrometer and eddy current sensor, this robot searched the ice sheets of Antarctica and autonomously made the first robotic identification of a meteorite, in January 2000 at the Elephant Moraine. This paper discusses rock classification from a robotic platform, and describes the system onboard Nomad.