Abstract: Introduction and Context Setting will be provided by Dr. Daniel Koditschek, University of Pennsylvania.Humanity’s growing need to instrument the desert represents a new
opportunity for robotics to impact society. Sand and dust storms have
emerged as a growing worldwide menace, impacting increasingly large
human populations on nearly every continent, damaging habitation,
disrupting transportation, threatening agriculture, human health and
life, as well as a permanently altered “desertified” environment. Soil
erodibility is a key determinant of spatio-temporal wind erosion
patterns, but few metrics – and still less empirical data – have been
developed to map out erodibility at the landscape scale over the
days-to-weeks timescales of chief relevance. Empirical studies at the ~
acre/day scales are presently underway in several geographical regions,
but there is growing evidence that far more data at still higher
spatiotemporal resolution will be required to adequately inform emerging
theoretical models. Continuing advances in satellite remote measurement
technology respond in some measure to these needs, but it is clear that
the heterogeneous theory (e.g. the dust chemistry and flux) associated
with desertification models is only poorly constrained by such coarse
grained measurements. An emerging new generation of field-portable
systems (e.g., miniaturized wind tunnels and in situ wind erosion
apparatus or portable spectroradiometers or laser particle counters) can
provide information at the requisite spatial and temporal scale.
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