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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."
at least it moves faster than my grandmother...
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Actually, I'm impressed even at this. As long as nothing is failing, it gives me hope for future missions.
-Oy Vey
After successfully completing a journey of 88 feet yesterday, the Spririt Mars Rover completed a journey of 88 feet 2 inches today. This is a new Mars distance record.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
it was up on a hill, and the brakes malfunctioned...
Have anyone of them found any evidence of past weather yet?
Seems like everything they look at is of vulcanic origin.
It was probably cloudy out (negating some of the efficiency of the solar panels). I hope that it finds water.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
(Time And)Relative Dimensions in space... for the uninformed :-)
:-)
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
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
OOOOOH, Shiny!
can't resist urge.
Go SPEED Racer! Go Speed Racer!
Sig it.
"Spirit! Quit playing in the dirt! We have 100 more feet to go!"
"(sad R2-D2 sound)"
Didn't the Soviet built lunar rovers go much further in a single day back in the early 70's? What sort of over-hyped/overly-specific record is this?
"And the award for longest roving in the past 3 weeks on a neighboring planet by an American robot who's name rhymes with 'kirit' goes to...."
I demand a recount!
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Do we have to put blinkers on the little fella?
Eibhear
How do we know it was actually studying rocks ... maybe it was, oh, working on that Q-36 Illidium Space Modulator Death Ray?!?!
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The latest information on Spirit's and Opportunity's adventures can be found here!
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.
This thing travelled millions and millions of miles at tens of thousands of miles per hour to get to the planet, and now we're measuring its progress in terms of "feet per day".
One martian day is apparently 24.7 hours.
:-)
So I guess it moved at this amazing speed?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
... as there is the wrong type of dust on the ground.
Are they sure it was 88 feet? Could've been meters...
It must be Thursday... I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
88 feet is longer than 70 feet? By golly, I'm glad that someone made sure to mention that. :P
Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way So they sent a robot with ADD to 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.
Sounds like the li'l guy could use some Ritalin! Hey stop playing in the dirt!
88 feet is roughtly 25 metres, one width of an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Rich
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. ?
My grandmother in the last 5 years has had an average speed of 0.000004mph. This is because she moves only every now and then.
The Spirit rover does 0.00000000001mph on average since it landed on Mars because most of the time
it does nothing.
They need to give the remote controls to some punk kids that dont know its importance.
If they did that they would have found beagle,
discovered that Mars is just a shitty desert, overloaded Nasa's database of names for every shitty litte rock they find, and eventually drove
off a cliff giving us spectacular images of Mars!
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).
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88 'feet'?! You mean Mars hasn't gone metric?!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Metric units please ! - NASA have enough trouble with Imperial-Metric conversions without the Slashdot breeding another backward Imperial generation.
( Of course, with the pathetic spelling and grammar here, American Literature also seems doomed... ).
When asked about the heat issue, Bush assured reporters we'd be going at night.
This is almost exactly the same way that Captain Scarlet woke up the Mysterons...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It had it's left turn signal blinking the entire way :)
Strictly speaking, that's not a domain of artificial intelligence, but pure computer vision. There are known techniques for building a map, given processed camera images, and there is usually no reasoning involved. Just a simple algorithm to find the shortest path. The search space is usually small enough not to warrant AI techniques.
Of course, it is possible that they are using higher-level AI techniques for finding the optimal path, but I doubt it as the classical image processing techniques are fast and robust enough for this sort of task.
Computers may not yet pass the Turing test, but it's pretty good that we've managed to get them up to pooch standard.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Anyone who has tried to go for a walk with a 2 or 3 year old kid knows what I'm talking about. You want to walk, but the annoying little brat will stop and examine very carefully every piece of litter, little stone, gravel or mark on the floor. Half way through the whole thing you'll get tired and just go home.
Mars is metric. Martians have ten feet.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
The Spirit Rover breaks its record once again by travelling 185 feet - unfortunately, this was due to it getting a bit TOO close to the crater, and was 185 feet downwards.
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
I wonder if NASA had, at some point during the construction and testing of the rover, actually put the rover through a simulated Martian drive.
The reason is that, depending on the consistency and the texture of the Martian soil, you would probably want to build the rover somewhat differently if it's dry and dusty as opposed to rocky and uneven - much like how we build our cars and SUVs.
I suppose they probably still have data from the Vikings expeditions, but that is more than twenty years ago.
Anyone who's been hiking with a 4 year old knows what that's like.
Do you have ESP?
After watching that special I have more respect and admiration for the people at JPL. Alot of creativity and problem solving went into this project and I'm really happy for all of them.
The thing is that the rover is not looking for signs of life, just for rocks and possibly signs of water. Its obvious that the aliens that control the U.S. government had NASA design it that way. The aliens don't have as much clout with the European Space Agency so they weren't able to keep the creators of the Beagle from designing it to look for life. They had to disable it once it got to the planet. This way they won't find any evidence of life that gets to the surface from the underground Martian cities.
That sure sounds like the classic definition of AI as "anything a computer can't do yet". At one point, translation of high-level statements into machine code was considered AI. Then Fortran came along and it's not AI, it's solved, see? Decent speaker-dependent voice recognition was once AI, now it's something you can buy in the store and nobody considers it to be AI.
All the stuff you describe sounds an awful lot like AI to me. Just because it's actually doable with known techniques shouldn't disqualify it.
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If there's an impending rock-slide, then the rover gets crushed. Remember that whatever the scientists in control see is around five minutes old, and that any directions of avoidance take an addition five minutes or so to reach the rover.
Besides, I don't believe they're letting the rover choose its own targets, nor did they give it power to override an imperative command.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
They need to give the remote controls to some punk kids that dont know its importance.
You think playing a first-person shooter over satellite is bad? Imagine the six-figure ping times to Mars.
Well, that seems to be the 'common' understanding of AI, but in the computer science (and other scientific fields), it has a more specific meaning. Otherwise, factoring large numbers would also be considered AI, although there is nothing intelligent about it, given a good algorithm. Finding that algorithm is what would require intelligence.
Here is a definition I like:
AI is the capacity of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot device to perform tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. The term is also frequently applied to that branch of computer science concerned with the development of systems endowed with such capabilities. --- Herbert A. Simon, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
I am nitpicking here, but given an algorithm to extract edges and corners from two images, using the camera calibration values to calculate distance, and creating a map based on these data does not require intelligence, and as such isn't strictly AI.
The robot still follows strict instructions which find the optimal path. It will not learn if this algorithm fails a certain number of times, it will not generalise to make future computation quicker, like a human would. It does not have a concept of the obstacles. It does not get more proficient after doing the same for a while. So, even though it's a brilliant example of applied computer vision and autonomous navigation, there is very little of what is considered AI involved. Hope this clears it up a bit.
You can learn more about how the rover works by downloading NASAs Maestro Program. It's a RAM hungry Javaapp that is nicely documented and let's you plan your own mission using their stripped down version of the Uplink-Browser. Give it a shot, it's pretty interesting (well, at least if you got some spare time on your hands to fiddle with it and are into Marsroving at all!).
cu,
Lispy
You might want to see this mildly humorous QuickTime movie on the official MER site detailing how the rovers get around without engineers having to shimmy the things around every other obstacle. The thing does it by itself--something the Russian lunar rovers didn't do.
Two words about the movie's beginning: Bullet time.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
seems the hype on this thing is way out of scale. I am not trying to marginalize NASA accomplishments, though I do find some statements pretty funny.
When they cut into one of the rocks:
"It went deeper than we ever imagined!" (Few millimeters)
Assessing the landing site:
"We can't believe our luck!" (Flat, with a few rocks)
etc.
Now, I think the rover is cool, and want the science just as much as anyone else does, but the statements from the scientists (or their PR person) are just giddy.
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In 1969, the world stood breathless as an American stepped onto the surface of a new world.
Today, we get all excited because a golf cart moves 80 feet.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I've seen no proof that the Rover reasons, discovers meaning, generalizes or learns from past experience. It just runs a program which gives it very direct commands.
It's a bit like this: If I ask you to get some good tomatoes, you would break this up into several steps: Go to the market, find the tomatoes, then select some good ones. But what is a 'good' tomato? You will have to rely on your experience, your taste, and the past input from others to determine what a good tomato is. Then you would choose the tomatoes which best fit the ideal you have in your mind.
A computer cannot do that. It has no concept of what a tomato is. It doesn't deduce properties from past experiences. You can program a robot to go to the market (by giving it specific instructions on how to do that), then have it pick up tomatoes which have a certain height, weight, a given hue, and a softness, all expressed in measurable units. The robot would bring back some 'good' tomatoes according to these requirements, but it wouldn't be doing anything remotely intelligent, even though it might look like it from the outside.
Now, an AI approach to this would be to model a tomato internally, for example, using a Bayes net of different fruits, associated with different properties. A tomato would be grouped with similar fruits according to some characteristics. The computer would learn through repeated observations (like a human does), and propagate its deductions throughout the net. For example, a squashed tomato and a squashed pepper are both 'bad' fruit/vegetables, and a red pepper and a red tomato would both be 'good', but a green pepper can be good, while a green tomato cannot. The network gets updated to accommodate these observations and build a better model, up to the point where the computer can pick the 'good' fruit without being told exactly what it is.
See, in the second example, there is learning, there is deduction, and there is reasoning, as well as generalization. In the first one, there isn't. That is the fundamental difference.
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.
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The article is from CNN, not directly from NASA, so you can't conclude anything about what units NASA is using by reading it. If you actually go to the JPL website, it turns out that the original material from NASA uses metric units as the primary measure, with Imperial units added for ease of comprehension.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.