When: Friday, September 10, 3:30 p.m.- 4:30 p.m.

Where: 1305 Newell-Simon Hall

Dr. Mark Maimone, JPL

RI Seminar

Abstract:
NASA successfully landed two mobile robot geologists on the surface of Mars in January 2004: the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers. Their primary goal was to find evidence of past water at Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, two geologically distinct sites on opposite sides of the planet. Although the achievement of their successful landings stands out as a technological tour de force, it was their ability to navigate while on the surface of Mars that enabled both rovers to succeed in their primary goals.

Driving was done either in a very directed way (following a path chosen by human Rover Drivers), or in an autonomous mode where the rover was allowed to decide for itself whether and where to drive. This autonomous navigation capability enabled the vehicles to drive safely even through areas never before seen on Earth: more than 1500 meters of the rovers' combined distance was driven autonomously.

This mission has demonstrated groundbreaking use of several key NASA-sponsored Robotics technologies. The MER rovers are the first spacecraft to use passive stereo vision processing for hazard detection, dense traversability analysis for onboard terrain assessment and safe path selection, and feature-tracking Visual Odometry for position estimation. Each MER vehicle has also driven farther in one day than Sojourner did during its three month lifetime. << Back