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Hyperion Rover, 1 km On One Command

Posted by Hemos on from the planning-ahead dept.

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."

25 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. It has to What Now? by Jonsey · · Score: 5, Funny

    One of it's primary goals is to avoid shady paths by knowing the location of everything in the solar system?

    I mean, I've heard of over-engineered. But really folks? : ) That's Scalability.

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    1. Re:It has to What Now? by frovingslosh · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Yup, the same statement struck me as rather absurd too. No only would the stuff you track be meaningless, but say, for example you were the little robot that could exploring Mars and you calculated that Earth was about to eclipse the sun (not that it could be much of an eclipse from Mars' view, but you must be tracking these things for some reason). What the heck can the rover do? It's not like it's going to move to avoid the eclipse!

      And yes, I read the link, it says nothing about this. Perhaps submissions by anonymous deserve a little more editing.

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    2. Re:It has to What Now? by jim3e8 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. That's impressive by cybermace5 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It all depends, however, on whether it really was on purpose....

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    ...
    1. Re:That's impressive by in7ane · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's true, from the photos it looks like it just rolled along a pretty much flat field.

      The setup simply looks too flimsy (assembled out of two bikes?) to go over any significant obstacles.

      I do not doubt that the tracking system, etc. are impressive - they've just got to hook them onto a decent base and send it across a more challenging landscape. On the other hand that will seem like a military application then :)

    2. Re:That's impressive by Transient0 · · Score: 5, Funny

      It also depends on whether it can do it across all different kinds of terrain and with some level of reliability.

      I built an autonomous rover out of a Tonka dumptruck once. It could also travel a kilometer on one command. The command just happened to be the ignition switch to the rocket I had strapped to it.

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    3. Re:That's impressive by Molina+the+Bofh · · Score: 4, Funny

      yes. It was. Its command was "go ahead forward". So it covered 1km of flat desert land till it crashed on the very first cactus that appeared and got stuck.

      --

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      Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
  3. Everything? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    "...by finding the position of virtually everything in the solar system."

    Even...Uranus?

    1. Re:Everything? by Sri+Lumpa · · Score: 3, Funny

      "...by finding the position of virtually everything in the solar system."

      "Even...Uranus?"

      Don't worry, it is programmed to avoid shade so it won't go where the Sun doesn't shine.

      Now if it could find the position of my keys in the morning that would be nice (I'm almost certain that they are in the solar system so it shouldn't be a problem).

      --
      "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
  4. Stop mixing apples and oranges! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny



    Hyperion Rover, 1 km On One Command

    Posted by Hemos on Monday July 28, @10:56AM
    from the planning-ahead dept.
    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."

    Shouldn't that be kilometerstones?

  5. Easy to beat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Park a boat off of someplace deep. Have your AIBO walk the plank. Depending on where you try this, you should be able to get much more than 1km on a single command.

  6. Not the driest place on Earth by haz-mat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not the driest place on Earth by YomikoReadman · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    2. Re:Not the driest place on Earth by haz-mat · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    3. Re:Not the driest place on Earth by Dan-DAFC · · Score: 5, Informative

      "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).

      --
      Suck figs.
  7. cool ! by jacquesm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is really cool... but other than that the general state of robotics is more and more hampered by legalities, such as liability insurance for the 'owner/operator' of any kind of robot.

    It's funny how if you look back at the turn of the century there was no legal barrier to try out new technological stuff, but just try to imagine the then inventors of automobiles selling their first rickety inventions in todays unbelievably hostile legal climate. The whole technological and transportation revolution would simply not have happened

    That's why we see robots for use on other planets, but we'll probably not see them on this one (unless of course we ship all the lawyers to some other planet first).

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    1. Re:cool ! by jacquesm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      no, my premise is that it is no longer possible for smaller companies to bring stuff to market because the first (even failed) lawsuit will probably put them out of business, and because insurance companies will not cover product related liability at a price that will make the product still affordable because of the absolutely ridiculous amounts that are routinely awarded in product liability cases.

      Around the turn of the century people accepted that new technologies and their development incurred a certain amount of risk taking on the part of the public, nowadays we expect to be absolutely safe from the cradle to the grave.

      Lawyers have heavily capitalized on this (especially in the US) with all kinds of bogus lawsuits about product 'failures' (you probably know the various examples as well as I do.)

      This is keeping a whole pile of potentially interesting devices of the market or from being developed at all because the would be developers feel that actually selling their work would expose them to all kinds of harm (especially if they are somewhat successful).

      The 'I'll sue you' attitude is becoming more and more widespread and is having an ever stifling effect on development.

      The only way we are going to go forward is by making mistakes (accidents) and taking risk, not by taking a risk, getting into an accident and then to sue left right and center just to either make a buck or to soothe some inner child that feels wronged.

      Large corporations see the new legal culture as a new form of tax, smaller corporations simply go under (or never even get off the ground).

      It's evident that robotic technology will initially at least lead to all kinds of exposure to risk, especially if we let the devices loose in our urban jungles. But if we do not then we'll never learn what to fix, and the development will be slowed down to the point where you'll be hard put to mark any progress at all since a device will have to be absolutely bullet proofed before it can be sold.

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  8. Impressive. by rde · · Score: 5, Funny

    Robotic considerations in addition to instrument integration include platform configuration, planetary-relevant localization, complex obstacle negotiation, over-the-horizon navigation, and power-cognizant activity planning.

    We're looking for a manager at the moment with a lot of those skills.

    But seriously, folks. This is quite cool. Its capabilities at the moment seem to surpass by far those of the mars bots that are currently wending their way through space. Am I missing something, though, or have most of those experiments nothing to do with astrobiology? Not a cavil, just wondering.

  9. Perfect... by SuperDuG · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I mean lets face it the smarter robots get the more we advance as a race. If we can understand the minds we program to be able to see the logic or logical answer then we better start to understand ourselves.

    But the problem being it begins to raise questions about the future, if we model a machine after ourselves so much will it be our demise? Science fiction has a way of blowing things out of proportion. When we first started seeing atomic weapons there was a fear we'd destroy the world over and over again, but we haven't yet.

    I think the more we learn to understand ourselves the closer we are to advancing the human race to the next level of existance.

    "Forget about exploring space, we still don't have the slightest clue about our own bodies".

    --
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  10. Stereo navigation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "over-the-horizon stereo navigation"

    That's like when you can hear boy racers in their Escorts before you can see them, right?

  11. Scary next-gen by Dirk+Pitt · · Score: 4, Funny
    The successor of the 'Hyperion', naturally, will be 'The Shrike':

    Shrike Rover, 1k Slaughtered On One Command

  12. Is it up to the DARPA challenge? by Jon+Abbott · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A while back there was a story on Slashdot about a $1M prize to the first group who could design a robot to autonomously travel from LA to Las Vegas... From the sounds of it, this might be a good candidate for the challenge!

    --
    Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
  13. Only thing I could think of... by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

    was that it was trying to avid solar occlusions by other planets and moons!

    "Response from Hyperion: Cannot execute command, busy navigating 4000km to east to avoid total solar eclipse in 2004".

    --
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  14. Get One For Yourself! by notcreative · · Score: 5, Funny
    Many of you read the article and wondered how you could get one of these to play with. I figured out a quick "do-it-yourself" solution....
    • Fly to Chile
    • Go to the Atacama desert
    • Hide behind a dune (bring water)
    • Wait for rover to trundle by
    • Take the rover and run
    • Possession is .9 of the law
    I call this the "Sandpeople Technique."
  15. DARPA Grand Challenge - Join Team Overbot by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Team Overbot is developing an autonomous robot vehicle for entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge. 200 miles through the desert in 10 hours - no driver. $1,000,000 prize.

    We have to do a lot better than Hyperion did. 300km, not one. And faster.

    We're looking for a few good people. Hard work, no pay, some risk, a chance for a fraction of the prize. See our current openings.

    We're in Silicon Valley. We have funding, a shop in an industrial park in Redwood City, a vehicle under construction, and six people. We need about six more.