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NASA Gives Mars Rover Extra Smarts
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it upgraded the software controlling its Mars Rover Opportunity to let it make its own decisions about what items like rocks and interesting red planet formations to focus its cameras on. The new system, which NASA uploaded over the past few months, is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS and it lets Opportunity's computer examine images that the rover takes with its wide-angle navigation camera after a drive, and recognize rocks that meet specified criteria, such as rounded shape or light color. It can then center its narrower-angle panoramic camera on the chosen target and take multiple images through color filters, NASA stated."
Good upgrade but I really gotta question the added 'inferiority complex routine' listed in the release notes that requires the rover to periodically contemplate its ultimate fate and update a twitter feed where NASA engineers can either encourage the rover or ridicule it.
My work here is dung.
There are multiple levels of software on the rover. There is a failsafe module to turn everything off if it runs out of power, there is a bootloader OS to handle software crashes and give memory dumps to ground controllers, there is the main OS that runs the vehicle, and then there are scripts the main OS can run. This is one of the scripts.
Note that the summary says they spent "months" uploading the new software--they did it very meticulously, in chunks, with checksums, and probably read back the whole memory before giving it execute permissions.
If you were keeping up with the news when they launched the rovers, you might remember that they launched with only the bootloader installed--they actually uploaded the vehicle OS mid-flight before they reached Mars. So something like this isn't a big deal once it's been tested within an inch of its life to get "flight" qualified. The big deal is that they actually got it that far--NASA has historically been very reluctant to give their craft any more autonomy than absolutely necessary. Hopefully we are turning a corner on that.