Hamilton students heading to Iceland to map caves with a drone, hoping their invention will be used in space
CBC
A team of McMaster University students in Hamilton will soon head to Iceland, where they'll camp out by a series of underground lava tubes they plan to map with a drone.
The drone uses hardware and software designed by the undergraduate students, who hope their tech will one day be used in space exploration to specially map underground areas in space.
There are about 25 student members of the McMaster Deep-space Analogue Research Expedition (DARE) team. After a year of planning, five of them will go to Iceland for about two weeks in August.
"Being the first people to actually create a digital map of these specific caves, that's gonna be really exciting," said Daniel Young, one of the students taking the trip.
Michael Holder, the club's president, said McMaster DARE is based on building and testing solutions to aerospace-related problems, and mapping underground spaces is one of them.
"If there's a piece of sensitive equipment or a group of astronauts on another planet entering a subterranean cave or any kind of crevice, they don't really know much because there's no easy way to see in," said Holder, an engineering physics student.
The team's solution, called Canary, would be able to fly in and send back data on the spaces in question, through the use of sensors. WIth LiDAR (light detection and ranging), which measures distances, Canary can also map areas.
"If we can create a system that can go in before [explorers] and tell them areas of interest and potential hazards, then they have a better idea of what's in there," Holder told CBC Hamilton, alongside the team's co-vice-presidents, Young and Harry Wu.
"You can think of it a little bit like the old adage 'canary in a coal mine.' That's why it's called Canary," Holder said. "Send it in beforehand, and it gives them a warning and an idea of what's going on."
Holder, Wu, Young and the two other McMaster DARE members will test Canary in Iceland because the lava tubes there are geographically similar to caves on the moon or Mars.
Iceland's geography has made it a popular site for analog missions, which refer to experiments in environments similar to those in outer space.
The lava tubes that DARE is going to are unnamed, but close to a big tube called Surtshellir, which is a two-hour trip from Reykjavik, Holder said.
Canary consists of a store-bought quadcopter drone and custom plastic chassis on which the electrical components attach.
Wu, DARE's electrical lead, showed previous versions of the circuit board the system will use, each smaller and more streamlined than the last.