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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."
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.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
It all depends, however, on whether it really was on purpose....
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
"over-the-horizon stereo navigation"
That's like when you can hear boy racers in their Escorts before you can see them, right?
Shrike Rover, 1k Slaughtered On One Command
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".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
- 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."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.
MP3 Search Engine
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.