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.
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