Hyperion Rover, 1 km On One Command

An anonymous reader writes "Carnegie Mellon's next generation robot just finished its Chilean expedition and achieved a new planetary exploration benchmark, including being the first autonomous rover to cover 1 km on a single command. The other milestones from the Atacama Desert, Chile--the driest place on the planet--centered on over-the-horizon stereo navigation, sun-tracking for efficient solar panel pointing, and fault recovery. CMU shows pictures of the robot, called Hyperion, in action. One of its prime objectives was to plot courses that avoid shade, by finding the position of virtually everything in the solar system."

Comments

Not the driest place on Earth

[haz-mat]

It is a widely held misconception that the Atacam desert in Chile is the driest place on Earth, in fact the driest place on Earth is in the center of Antartica where there has been no percipitation in over 10,000 years.

Re:Not the driest place on Earth

[YomikoReadman]

Antarctica is only the driest place on Earth if you go by annual rainfall. The Atacam desert is the driest place on earth counting humidity. Besides, Last time i checked, Antarctica was covered in snow, which if I'm not mistaken is ice, which I'm quite sure is nothing more than frozen water.

Re:Not the driest place on Earth

[haz-mat]

Evidence for those who disbelieve:
One interior region of the Antarctic is known as The Dry Valleys. These valleys have not seen rainfall in over two million years. With the exception of one valley, whose lakes are briefly filled with water by inland flowing rivers during the summer, the Dry Valleys contain no moisture (water, ice, or snow).
Please see the following as well:
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~owen/MD2001/ANTAR CTIC/UM Handout.Info.html

Re:Not the driest place on Earth

[Dan-DAFC]

"The Dry Valleys are from north to south Victoria, Wright and Taylor, and they are unusual in as much as no rain has fallen there for at least two million years. They have no ice or snow either because the air is too dry for any to exist (ice-free spaces in the Antarctic are called oases). They are enormous, desolate places covering around 3000 sq km (1170 sq mi) and were first happened upon by Robert Scott in December 1903. He wrote '...we have seen no living thing, not even a moss or a lichen...it certainly is the valley of the dead; even the great glacier that once pushed through it has withered away'."

From the Lonely Planet guide (for those who want to holiday there).

Re:It has to What Now?

[jim3e8]

The article says that the rover is equipped with software that knows the position of everything in the solar system. But it doesn't check them all against each other. It simply means that, given any planet, it will know the position of that planet and the sun, and can therefore find the sun's position in the sky. They did this so it can be sent to any planet, not limited to just one.

The submitter was a little overzealous in assuming it checks the position of everything in the solar system for overlap.

Re:Is it up to the DARPA challenge?

[RainbowSix]

CMU is one step ahead of you. There is already a seperate project devoted to the challenge in question.

Re:That's impressive

[David Ishee]

From my reading of the site, it seems that this robot was built specifically for the environment that it was in. They were mainly interested in testing subsystems and gaining experience.

In this context, there were no great terrain obstacles.