Titan Moon Explorer Robot

Way back in 2013, Humanoido used his M3T Molecular Mining power telescope to capture this
image of Moon titan seen passing in front of planet Saturn

Titan Moon Robot
designed and built by Humanoido
https://humanoidolabs.blogspot.com/2013/09/robot-explorer-index.html

Titan Moon Robot Explorer was built inside Humanoido Laboratory and completed by January 2014. As seen (far above), captured with Humanoido's M3T Molecular Mining Telescope, the Moon Titan passes in front of planet Saturn's globe. Directly above, construction of the Titan Moon Explorer Robot is underway. Refer to the link for the index of numerous blogs about this robot.

The Titan Moon Explorer Robot is a mobile autonomous intelligent machine with 24 processing cores and driven by motors, sensors, batteries and a recharging wind generator. It uses infrared ground detectors, a PIR, ultrasonic vision, and a CCD camera to navigate this hydrocarbon based moon. 

The first image returned from the wireless experimental
system during construction and testing

The robot explorer transmits wireless images of Titan's surface using a high resolution color camera. The images and video is stored on a card for retrieval at activation. The robot contains a weather station for determining the temperature and keeping heating elements on at the proper time so the system does not freeze solid. Recharging eight batteries is accomplished with a small portable wind generator to catch Titan's wind and breezes. The brain has two Parallax Propeller processors with a third upgrading more systems, with a total of twenty-four  hardware cores to handle multiple simultaneous functions. Special programming increases the chip power and the number of cores to three-hundred and twenty four. The bot has 2 motors and one front wheel, with autonomous exploration software.

SETUP
The current setup is a desktop proof of concept using frequencies centered around 1.2 GHz on four channels, and additional channels in the UHF, VHF range for long range wireless operations.

EXPERIMENTS
Experiments conducted include the camera eye on a robot that feeds images into a micro-miniature 1.2 GHz transmitter. The camera eye and transmitter remain on board the robot and wireless send images to the base station on one channel. This channel includes video and audio bands.

CONVERSION
The base station at Mission Control has a 1.2 GHz receiver that converts the signal to standard NTSC composite 1V p-p (AV) and feeds it into the TV. The TV has audio/video AV input.

MORE CHANNELS
A second Parallax Propeller chip, known as the sensor chip, transmits data telemetry on the VHF band USA channel 3. This is received directly by Mission Control's multi-band analog TV. Data transmitted includes information from sensors and various parameters including the condition of the robot and its decisions.

RECORDING TELEMETRY
The  TV monitor also has video out which can feed into a VCR or other digital recording device for a record of the mission's proceedings.

The robot must have a coat of insulation to keep the heater's warmth inside. The coat will cover the conductive and heat distributive aluminum chassis. Testing in a conventional food freezer is a good idea. The sensors can be operated at their lower temperature ratings below the freezing point to simulate operation inside the insulated container. More elaborate tests may involve chambers of dry ice at -109 degrees or a vessel of liquid nitrogen at -320 to -346 deg. F. No one knows the speed or particulate matter content of the air on the surface. Roughly speaking, the robot could function on the current conventional batteries a day with no wind or a much longer time with wind. Either way, it will work and gather science. Electronic components are designed to function because the insulated probe, covered with insulation and heated with a heater, will not reach -289 deg. F. Components will undoubtedly run at their lower limits so the probe will not be heated to room temperatures. Cold environments are actually beneficial for the processor, making it more efficient with less power and less noise. There's enough gravity on this moon to cause rain to fall from the sky. The rain is double the size of Earth rain droplets and falls much slower, more like Earth snowflakes. There's frozen hydrocarbon sand so it does fall to the ground. The windmill should not contaminate quickly but if it did, it would shorten the life of the probe. It's more likely the particles are so tiny and hard frozen, they won't affect performance. If the wind is too slow, it will be a problem for the windmill to recharge several battery packs. However, the air is over twice as thick as the Earth's air, so it's likely it will have good wind for driving the rotor. Observations of changing clouds indicate the presence of wind too. For periods of no wind, the probe can rest and sleep and wake up periodically to look and see if the batteries have recharged.