Red Rover, Red Rover .... U.S. Sending 2 Vehicles Over

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37210-2003Dec28.html ^

[rs79bm]

It looks like something you might build from a pile of junk. It has a clunky body balanced on six wheels, eyeball-like cameras, moving panels that look like insect wings and a long probe that reaches out to grab things.

[rs79bm]

Freepmail me if you want on or/off my Sci/Tech ping list.

[Batrachian]

I'll be damned if that thing doesn't look like Number 5 from the movie "Short Circuit".

[Blue Screen of Death]

I wonder how much BMW or some car company would pay to stick their emblem on this and sholder some of the cost.

[RightWhale]

Little known facts:

The Rovers are programmed to land on opposite side of Mars.

[rs79bm]

Can a MER think for itself?

In a very limited way. The thing that we must trust it to do is to find its way through a field of obstacles. If you're down here on Earth and you want the rover to drive 30 meters to the northwest, ideally what I would like to do would be to move a joystick and steer [the rover] around the rocks, and go left and right and experience that in real time. You can't do that because Mars is so far away. It takes 10 minutes, traveling at the speed of light, before anything happens at the other end. So we've given the vehicle enough intelligence that we can trust it to make safe decisions on its own.

Such as?

We don't ask it to find the good rocks, we don't ask it to figure out how to reach the arm out and touch something all on its own -- those are very hard things to do for a robot. But we do ask it to be able to drive along and not get into trouble. The interesting thing is that you can program different levels of courage into this vehicle. It looks ahead to obstacles and says to itself, "Oh, that's small, I'm not afraid of that," or "Oh, that's big, I don't want to go near that." We can adjust how it sees, and make a rock look safe or scary, depending on how confident we are in the rover's ability to handle it. We will be very cautious at first. We might make it a little braver as time goes on.

[muir_redwoods]

I'm holding my breath hoping the things deploy properly. After the unfortunate fate of the UK unit we just don't need another flop. I think I recall the the second will deploy by 1/25/04. Best of luck to the folks at Nasa.

[monday]

"I wonder how much BMW or some car company would pay to stick their emblem on this and sholder some of the cost."

Not much given the relibility of most government projects. Be pretty embarrassing when it gets to Mars and someone remembers the key is back on earth.

[RightWhale]

Pizza Hut put their logo on a big booster a couple years ago for $1 million. Whatever's in the advertising budget.

[FreedomFarmer]

"Number 5 Alive!"