NASA's Mars rovers are trying to discover new things on the red planet. The crews that operate the rovers do all they can to protect them and the billions of dollars behind them. The decisions surrounding where the rovers go, the paths they take to get there and the science they uncover are driven by the balance between risk and reward.
A new approach to balancing the risks and scientific value of sending planetary rovers into dangerous situations has been developed by researchers in the school of computer science.
David Wettergreen, a research professor in the RI, and a data scientist at NASA, will present their work, "An Approach to Science and Risk-Aware Planetary Rover Exploration." The paper has been published in several journals.
Wettergreen said that they looked at how to balance the risk of going to challenging places against the value of discovering there. The next step in navigation is to produce more and better data.
They combined a model used to estimate science value with a model that estimates risk. The robot's interpretation of the mineral composition of rocks is used to estimate the science value. The robot may choose to explore somewhere new if it thinks it has identified rocks correctly. The robot may decide to study the current area and improve its model if it is not confident. Zo used a previous version of the model during experiments in the Nevada desert.
The model used by the researchers estimates how difficult it will be for the rover to get to a specific location. There is a real concern about a rover's mission on Mars. The twin rovers were on Mars. The mission of Spirit ended in 2009, when it became stuck in a sand dune and was unable to move. The opportunity continued and worked until the end of the year.
Real Mars surface data was used to test the framework. The pair used this data to send a simulation rover about Mars and then evaluated the science gained from these missions.
The rover did a good job on its own. There were still lots of areas for the rover to explore even under high-risk simulations.
The research builds on the work done by the RI. Recent Mars rovers have been built using technology developed through the research that proposed and demonstrated methods that would allow rovers to move autonomously across the surface of other planets.
A self-reliant, six-legged robot that could prioritize its goals and chart its own path was proposed by researchers. In the early 1990s, the robot was tested. Ratler is a rover that follows the sun to charge its batteries.
Zo has traveled hundreds of miles in the Atacama Desert, an environment that is similar to Mars. Zo's missions in the desert shifted to focus on autonomously exploring and making decisions behind the scenes. A year after the rover autonomously decided to drill into the desert soil, it discovered what turned out to be unusual, highly specialized microbes.
During their upcoming trip to the Utah desert, Candela and Wettergreen hope to check out their work on Zo. Their research makes valuable contributions to lunar exploration. Scientists could use their approach to investigate potential routes in advance and balance the risk of those routes with the science they could gain. The approach could help a generation of rovers sent to the surface of planets to conduct science experiments. It was possible for the rover to assess the risk and reward before making a decision.
Wettergreen said that the goal was not to eliminate scientists, but to keep them involved in the inquiry. The goal is to make a robotic system more productive for scientists. We want to collect more and better data for scientists.
More information: Alberto Candela et al, An Approach to Science and Risk-Aware Planetary Rover Exploration, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3191949The conference is about intelligent robots and systems.
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