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"Part-Time" Scientists Aim To Build Autonomous Moon Rover

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-your-own-driving dept.

First time accepted submitter ziegenberg writes "The lunar rover 'Asimov' developed by the Part-Time Scientists, and due to land in 2014, will be the first autonomously navigated rover on the Moon. Its autonomous navigation system is a major technological leap. While the Russian Moon rovers Lunokhod 1 and 2 in the early 70s were fully controlled from Earth, today's Mars rovers like NASA's Mars Exploration Rover 'Opportunity,' which has been tirelessly exploring the Red Planet since 2004, are autonomous. However, Opportunity requires nearly three minutes to process a pair of images — a delay that causes it to move at an average speed of just 1 cm/sec or less. New developments by the technology partnership between the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics and the PTS have created, for the first time, an autonomous navigation system for a rover that has the capacity to process multiple images per second. The technology boosts a stereo camera that Asimov will use to calculate its own motion, generate a 2.5-dimensional environmental model, evaluate the site and determine a collision-free path — all in real time."

4 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. GPUs continue to take off ( this time literally ) by boshi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It seems like every month now that I wake up in the morning and see another amazing application for GPUs. It is incredible to see the progress that a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry can bring to other markets like space exploration that would normally run on super expensive first-generation prototype hardware.

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    Blog
  2. "Avg speed of 1 cm/sec" and a question by c0lo · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Opportunity (the rover) has a ration of 560 W*h/day for everything it needs to do - and this includes moving its 180 kg.

    Granted, the insolation will be better on the Moon than on Mars (closer to the Sun), but... just how much power their GPU is going to require for computing the 2.5 D env data?

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    Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    1. Re:"Avg speed of 1 cm/sec" and a question by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The moon also has a rather longer day - a lunar rover running solar would have to operate for fifteen days of sun, then hibernate for fifteen days of darkness. And the occasional eclipse. With that and the lack of an atmosphere, solar power isn't going to be an issue. More concerning is the task of keeping it from melting after fifteen days of intense solar radiation and no atmospheric cooling.

  3. exploring for the sake of exploring by Max_W · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Why not to build on the moon a large telescope-digital-photo-camera and make the HD images of Earth surface in almost real time?

    Not images of space, but images of Earth, of what is interesting and vital to us.

    Shooting cloudless areas on Earth constantly and feeding data into digital maps.

    I have an impression that moon pass over every piece of land on Earth. But nowadays the satellite images of Earth on digital maps are often obsolete, 4 - 5 years old, especially for small towns and villages.

    There will be no cost of stabilizing an artificial satellite.