Mars Rover Technology Used to Make Better Maps

Cal writes "An article on the O'Reilly Radar site discusses a new street mapping technology by a company in Berkeley called earthmine. They are using technology developed by the Jet Propulsion Lab for the Mars Exploration Rover missions for reconstructing three-dimensional data of the street-scape. 'The licensed software and algorithms are used to create a 3D representation of the local terrain, allowing autonomous routing of the MERs through the Martian environment. earthmine has combined this JPL technology with its unique, capture hardware and web delivery technology to deliver 3D data with unprecedented density and accuracy.'"

Comments

Re:Exclusive license for federally-funded research

[Rakishi]

OK, CalTech owns part of earthmine and JPL is at CalTech. That's fine, but didn't tax dollars pay for the technology developed at JPL? IANAL, but it *used* to be that federally-funded research needed to be made available to everyone - not licensed in perpetuity to a private company. When did this change? The US is based on the idea that capitalism is generally a good thing, if you disagree I recommend you move somewhere else because American culture just isn't for you.

So Caltech sells this technology to a private company which means it gets a cut of the profits. So the goverment's original funding has now helped generate a steady income source for caltech and the technology is still out there. So now the goverment's future grants can, for example, now be smaller since Caltech has a larger amount of private income. Likewise this is also an incentive for Caltech to continue producing usable technology if the grants don't decrease. After all if it had to give it away for free it has little incentive to make their work more generally applicable (they gain nothing from it).