Cool Robot, new icebreaker to gather polar data

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

HANOVER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - The Cool Robot is square, squat and slow, but its utilitarian beauty is clear to polar researchers who want a sturdy non-human helper to carry instruments over vast stretches of the Arctic and Antarctic.

Basically a wheeled box covered with solar panels, the Cool Robot was among innovative technologies presented at an Arctic "science summit" on Wednesday, along with an ice-breaker ship that can whirl slowly around on sea ice and a stand-alone science station that looks like a giant picnic cooler.

"The Cool Robot concept was a robot that could deploy instrument networks in a vehicle that was very light," said Laura Ray, a professor at Dartmouth College and a participant in the summit.

The robot weighs about 130 pounds (60 kg), runs quietly on solar power with a top speed of about 2 mph (3.219 kph) and navigates with global-positioning satellite, Ray said. Slow and steady, it can travel 310 miles in two weeks, with instruments loaded into its cubical body or towed on a sled.

It could make observations -- like measuring the properties of snow as indicators of climate change -- that are sometimes risky and expensive for humans to do in polar regions.

And that is the point. Ray said 70 percent to 85 percent of the budget for U.S. polar science programs pays for logistics. The use of a robot that provides its own power could help whittle that cost.

Presentations on the robot and other inventions were part of the Arctic Science Summit Week, which brought together scientists and policy makers from the Northern Hemisphere to consider global warming's impact on the polar regions.