ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers

coondoggie writes Taking a page from NASA's rocket powered landing craft from its most recent Mars landing mission, the European Space Agency is showing off a quadcopter that the organization says can steer itself to smoothly lower a rover onto a safe patch of the rocky Martian surface. The ESA said its dropship, known as the StarTiger's Dropter is indeed a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position, where it then switches to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to lower and land a rover autonomously.

Comments

GPS on Mars

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Really, are you sure it isn't Galileo?

Re:GPS on Mars

[frovingslosh]

a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position .....

Yup, hate to break it to you rocket scientists at NASA, but there is a slight flaw in this design for use on Mars.

Re:GPS on Mars

[Charliemopps]

a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position .....

Yup, hate to break it to you rocket scientists at NASA, but there is a slight flaw in this design for use on Mars.

I'd suspect those rocket scientists planned to, oh, I dunno, put GPS satellites into orbit around mars prior to landing the rover?

Re:GPS on Mars

[faffod]

a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position .....

Yup, hate to break it to you rocket scientists at NASA, but there is a slight flaw in this design for use on Mars.

I hate to break it to you, but ESA is the rocket scientists in Europe, not NASA....

European Probes

[TechyImmigrant]

Being a European probe, once landed it will open a small cafe serving croissants and excellent espresso.

Re:European Probes

[Nutria]

Being a European probe, once landed it will ...

Moan and bitch about Spirit & Opportunity spying on it, while in turn spying on economically valuable sectors of Spirit & Opportunity.

This is not going to work.

[SuricouRaven]

Mars has an atmosphere. Barely - atmospheric pressure is 0.006 earth-atmospheres. Maybe 0.01 if the weather is right and at a low enough point. You'd get bugger-all lift from a 'copter, quad or otherwise. Even in the nice one-third G, that thing isn't flying. It's hard enough getting something down by parachute - those rovers have to be built to take a nasty impact, because even with a huge parachute and low gravity they still hit the ground hard.

Re:This is not going to work.

[fche]

It's ESA, not NASA, and the focus of the work was apparently the vision-based guidance system, not the quadcopter propulsion (which indeed would be absurd on Mars).

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activit...

Re:This is not going to work.

[Warshadow]

Some friends of mine did exactly this as a research project last year.They did some testing at NASA Langley using some of their low pressure testing facilities.

It should be possible in a few years for sure and it may even be possible now. That being said, it's quite possibly the least efficient way to do anything anywhere, especially so on Mars. The rotor blades have to be enormous in order to generate enough lift. They also made some assumptions about materials used that aren't realistic right now, 5 years from now, probably, but not right now.

Seven Minutes of Terror

[GPS Pilot]

If you've never watched "Seven Minutes of Terror," which explains the crazy but successful scheme to lower the Curiousity rover onto Mars, do yourself a favor and go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

It's the best video the U.S. Government has ever produced.

Horrible Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the official press release, which states the real goal of the project:

Starting from scratch for the eight-month project, the Dropter team was challenged to produce vision-based navigation and hazard detection and avoidance for the dropship.

The quadcopter was just a COTS stand-in for testing their software.