When I was working on an ice climbing robot we spent a lot of effort trying to get large blocks of clear ice to test on. The thought was that we wanted repeatab

When I was working on an ice climbing robot we spent a lot of effort trying to get large blocks of clear ice to test on. The thought was that we wanted repeatable experiments. But then we realized that perfectly dense water ice is so hard and tough that our robot would not be able to get an ice screw into it. So we ended up trying to make something more similar to glacial ice. To do that we bought a nugget ice machine, filled large aluminum bins of that, and then backfilled with water, and had the robot climb on those in a walk-in freezer. https://eos.org/articles/meet-iceworm-nasas-new-ice-climbing-robot https://eos.org/articles/meet-iceworm-nasas-new-ice-climbing...