Slashdot Mirror
Spirit Rover Makes Longest Trip Yet
ivan1011001 writes "Spirit traveled just over 88 feet in an attempt to visit the crater "Bonneville" to look for evidence of water on Mars. Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way. This is longer than its earlier PR of 70 feet."
Have anyone of them found any evidence of past weather yet?
Seems like everything they look at is of vulcanic origin.
If the Mars rover is wont to go off on its own accord to discover and analyze things instead of following the directions given to it by mission control, could this possibly have disastrous side effects?
What if there were an impending rock-slide and instead of maneuvering out of the way as mission control told it to, it decided to look at the shiny rocks instead and got crushed in the process?
A little 'intelligence' is important for these things to figure out how to move around correctly, but artificial 'curiosity' seems to be problematic.
I have been pwned because my
I highly doubt the vehicle is that autonomous that they can say, "heay, head off bearing 110 deg, for 50m and take photos of interesting things along the way"
I always figured that mission control would give it vector commands like that, but that any kind of inspection would be manually done by instructions from mission control?
I can understand that it might have some self-preservation features, like slow down if too much wobble, or if grade is steep, but it seems like that things is really calling the shots.
Maybe we're not as far as logn as we thought, a la Stanly Kubrik's 2001 space oddesy.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Anyone else think it's sort of funny that you have a probe that travels millions of miles to another planet, and the news is that it's then travelled a further 88 feet :-)
Well think of it this way, spirit was launched through space flying towards mars at very high speeds, crashed into the martian surface, got out and managed to move 88 feet. That's increadible, the ability to land and still function on mars is more increadible than the fact that it made it their. NASA is fairly decent at launching stuff towards targets in space, the problem is having that stuff still work when it hits the target.
These little mini-missions are getting to be interesting. I wonder how long it will be before Spirit reaches the crater it is heading for.
:)
On an aside, Opportunity is in its crater, has been since it landed, pretty much. How much have we learned from it?
How much longer are these rovers going to last? Anybody want to set up a pool so we can all bet Karma on which rover will last longest/go farthest/etc. ?
The rover's stereo vision dynamically builds a 3D representation of its environment, and then figures out safe paths within that map.
That's all necessary because it just takes too long to specifically instruct each step (it's a 10 minute round trip at the speed of light to send instructions -- and so you want the rover to have some autonomy).
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Yes they did. But remember, that was on the moon and that's not that far away. The round trip for a radio signal would be just over one second. This allows for direct control of the probes from Earth. What the soviets landed where basically lunar RC cars. (Not to say it wasn't impressive! It definitly was for the time.)
Now Mars is a different matter. It's a LOT farther. A radio singal takes over 12 minutes to get there (and only when Mars is on our side of the Sun). The round trip would be 25 minutes. It would be impossible to directly drive the probe anything more than a few meters at a time with that lag. You'd get nowhere!
What's impressive here is that these rovers can drive themselves! They are just told where to go and they make there best effort to get there. It's really very impressive.
Also check out the QT animation on the NASA site titled "Rover Navigation 101: Autonomous Rover Navigation"
AI or not, it's pretty darn cool.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Only on slashdot do I make an attempt at geeky humor and learn something in the process.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Yeh, I remember first seeing it in the mid-1970s and thinking how cute it looked.
Articles on the net mention tens of thousands of pics taken by these rovers but I can't seem to find any examples. Have the Russians not made them public? An
Here are some, the Soviets did not tend to release all of their images to the wider World. It's good question though - I wonder who is looking after the gigabytes of data returned by the old Soviet missions? NASA has trouble with its vast funding, who knows what the Russians are doing?
Best wishes
Mike.
You haven't addressed my fundamental objection, which is that the definition of AI changes.
You stated two things. First, a definition of AI today. Second, that nothing Spirit does fits this definition.
I have no argument with this.
My complaint is that what Spirit is doing would have been considered AI twenty years ago. And twenty years from now, when we have a super-rover on Mars that is doing some of the stuff you quote, the definition of AI will have changed yet again so that it will only include things that computers can't do.
Again, is there an example of something that would be considered an AI technique that is in actual practical use today? I submit that there will never be a technique that is simultaneously considered to be AI and in actual practical use until we manage to create a full human-equivalent intelligence.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!