Case Study: MIT Rover Podium Finish with Peplink in NASA Competition

Houston, Texas, July 14, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chosen to participate in NASA's annual planetary rover competition. They sought to gain a competitive advantage by forming an unbreakable connection between the rover and mission control. With the help of Peplink technology, they went on to take second place in this prestigious event.

NASA’s annual Robo-Ops competition invites some of the best technology minds in the world to turn their talent and skill toward creating the next generation of planetary rovers. MIT was one of only eight universities selected by NASA to compete in this year’s Robo-Ops, and its newly-formed Robotics Team knew it would have to pull out all the stops to deliver a winning solution.

"fraught with unanticipated difficulties and pitfalls, Peplink's networking gear was intuitive and simple to setup and configure; it performed every bit as well as advertised."

MIT Robotics

In preparation against stiff competition, the MIT Robotics Team analyzed mountains of data from past runs conducted by other teams. Team members found one issue that played a huge role in the success of rover designs: communications. Simply put, robots need fast, reliable, and constant communication with human explorers, especially when countless hours of work are at stake.

The MIT team learned that other teams had consistently struggled with high-latency communication links, adversely affecting rover control. To top that off, signal dropouts caused precious seconds to be wasted in re-establishing connections, which could mean the difference between discovery and disaster.

"fraught with unanticipated difficulties and pitfalls, Peplink's networking gear was intuitive and simple to setup and configure; it performed every bit as well as advertised."

-MIT Robotics

Forty minutes into the competition, MIT Robotics encountered the single biggest issue they had feared -- a cellular coverage dead spot.

For the full case study, images, deployment scenario, visit 

http://www.peplink.com/solutions/case-studies/mit-robotics-team/

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