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

[Jherek Carnelian]

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? It didn't change, at least not in my lifetime. I still remember there being a bit of brouhaha over the GNU licensing of linux ethernet drivers (by Donald Becker I think) and parts of beowulf clustering written under contract to NASA over a decade ago. Lots of corporate entitlement types were PO'ed about the GNU licensing of that stuff because it went against long-standing tradition and they couldn't easily privatize that work and charge us over and over again for what had been paid for with tax dollars to begin with.