ETH Zurich students develop autonomous drone to survey alpine ice

A team of ten students from ETH Zurich, including mechanical and electrical engineers, has developed Polaris, an autonomous underwater vehicle designed to survey ice thickness in alpine lakes. The project aims to improve safety for winter activities on frozen lakes, such as skating and racing, where manual ice thickness measurements are often dangerous, time-consuming, and imprecise.

Polaris is a 30-kilogram torpedo-shaped robot equipped with six propulsion motors for multi-directional control and a watertight hull. The drone utilizes sonar technology to calculate ice thickness by measuring the time difference between pulses reflecting off the bottom of the ice sheet and those returning from the lake floor.

To facilitate autonomous operations, the submersible is powered by an NVIDIA Jetson processor and utilizes a variety of sensors for navigation, including GPS and Short Baseline (SBL) acoustic positioning. Beyond safety, the data collected by the drone is intended to assist climate models in forecasting how ice reacts to warming winter temperatures.