"We’re hoping to prove that it’s capable of continuous operation — that we can go 24 hours a day while following the sun," robotics researcher David Wettergreen said.
It works best in moderate temperatures just between daylight and dusk and can run on the same amount of electricity that would power four household light bulbs, Wettergreen said.
NASA paid $100,000 for parts and $900,000 in support for the 265-pound robot.
It recently took baby steps across the parking lot of the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium. Hyperion’s creators cheered when it stopped on its own for the first time, having sensed the nearby shins of graduate student M. Bernardine Dias.
The idea is having Hyperion’s successors someday do laps around the top or bottom of another planet while never leaving its twilight. The prototype has cameras that beam back pictures of nearby terrain, and the frame could be outfitted with other gear, perhaps for rock collecting, Wettergreen said.
"The earth is probably one of the worst places in the universe to test this because we have so many clouds," he said. "So if it can work here, we feel pretty strongly it can work somewhere else."
Building for the environment
Finding power for machines that roam other planets has been a vexing problem, one that ended the Sojourner robot’s work on Mars in 1997 when its batteries ran out, said Pascal Lee, a NASA planetary scientist at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
Lee leads the research team that will rigorously test Hyperion in and around a 23-million-year-old meteor crater on icy Devon Island.
"They’ve really taken an ingenious approach to the problem," Lee said. "They built their design around nature."
He said the crater and nearby Arctic desert are covered with rocks and ice that will challenge the robot and are "the closest thing we have to Mars on earth."
The island 200 miles west of Greenland was considered ideal for early tests because the sun stays above the horizon all night in July. A robot helicopter and space suits previously were tested on the island by NASA’s
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Follow the terminator
The robot is named for Hyperion, Greek mythology’s father of the sun, moon and dawn. In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero’s crew dies in a storm after the ill-advised slaughter of the sun god’s sacred cows.
The trick to making the robot work is telling its computer in advance where to find sunlight but not venture so far into the light that its parts might fry.
"On Earth, we’ll do that with a
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