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Guest_Sunspot_* |
Aug 25 2005, 11:22 AM
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4180840.stm
Europe has fixed on a concept for its next mission to land on the Red Planet. It aims to send a single robot rover to the Martian surface along with another, stationary, science package. |
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Jun 16 2006, 02:38 PM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
To be fair - it was hardly a beautiful tarmac highway....
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge05/gran...05/dsc_3925.jpg There are bits of the floor of Gusev crater, and almost all of Meridiani where I would rather drive my car than on that road Doug |
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Jun 16 2006, 03:20 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2542 Joined: 13-September 05 Member No.: 497 |
To be fair - it was hardly a beautiful tarmac highway.... Most of the teams preprogrammed the entire route from airphotos/satellite images and could have (or did) dead-reckoned nearly the whole way on GPS without even having vision or laser-scanning systems. And the vision systems were highly optimized to find the road edges. I looked at this fairly extensively a few months back, and in my opinion the applicability to planetary rovers is pretty low. I won't even discuss the relative power density between gasoline and solar or RTG systems. Between lidar and racks of processors, the GC vehicles were burning through kilowatts of electricity. -------------------- Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Guest_DonPMitchell_* |
Jun 16 2006, 07:26 PM
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#4
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Most of the teams preprogrammed the entire route from airphotos/satellite images and could have (or did) dead-reckoned nearly the whole way on GPS without even having vision or laser-scanning systems. And the vision systems were highly optimized to find the road edges. That's what I was getting at. It is a successful but special-purpose solution. I do think it is feasible to get a rover to avoid obsticles with occasional calls for help. But that takes another special-purpose solution that is pushing the state of the art. The rover is not going to be "smart" in any sense. News articles about these kinds of things always exagerate, both because the journalists don't understand the science and because the academic culture has evolved to speak very aggressively and compete for precious small grant money. There is a natural tendancy to anthropormorphize, and you see blatent attempts to encourage that with projects like these. They are fun to check out, but what you see is misleading. What biological brains do is indeed remarkable, and the robots you see in movies are pure science fiction. Nobody really knows how smart a computer could be if it was programmed correctly. Maybe a high-end PC could be as smart as a human, but the breakthrough in software technology has not happened yet. |
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