Who is a good Mars dog robot?

While Mars walkers have been and are surprisingly curious, they are not the most suitable, or the fastest, little bots – curiosity, for example, rolls over flat parts of the red planet’s surface at non-blistering resolution .09 miles and time. That’s about a third the speed at which most people walk.

At the Dec. 14, 2020 (virtual) meeting of the American Geophysical Union of America (AGU), held online this year, NASA / JPL-Caltech announced a new family of robotic red planet explorers: “Mars Dogs.”

They call it “Au-Spot,” and it’s based on the Boston Dynamics notoriety we’ve seen grow over the past few years in YouTube videos. We’ve seen live falls and kicks and we’ve even seen him dance to “Uptown Funk.” Spot has already evoked all sorts of emotions. It is urgent enough for a program of Black Mirror, and even without a face – or head – is also something strange.

Look at it

In a way, it’s the abuse we’ve seen Spot suffer on YouTube that makes it such a good candidate for Mars missions. If Au-Spot falls, it can do it itself, a potential that is not important when exploring foreign lands – this is one of the most important shortcomings of the present. “Toppling does not mean mission failure,” the scientists noted to the bot, according to Live Science. “Using recovery algorithms, the robot can self-correct from a number of falls.”

The 70-pound Au-Spot is also capable of moving three times faster than existing rovers.

This makes Au-Spot ideal for exploring Martian caves, an area of ​​great interest to those planning future missions on the planet. Satellite images of the red planet have revealed more than 1,000 cave openings. It may be possible for such trips for people to find shelter in caves away from the planet’s brutal dust storms, extreme cold, and the punishment of UV radiation. These places, however, are not places where conventional movers can be placed.

On the other hand, Au-Spot’s incredible flexibility and smarts allow scientists going underground to see if the caves can be useful to astronauts in the future. The bot puppy can go down to caves like that and then get back out. While there, he can make 3D maps of the land thanks to him on board a LIDAR. AI built into the bot will also let you learn the ground, so that it avoids damage or damage from blocked crashes. He strategically uses communication models along the way to keep his supervisors informed of what he is doing when he is under the surface.

Au-Spot can even intelligently choose between multiple routers, making it a far more flexible device than conventional rovers. Most things rovers do are pre-programmed routines – improvisation requires communication with a human controller back on Earth about 22 minutes away while the signal is flying.

Au-Spot Rise

Au-Spot is the child of a team of 60 scientists and engineers working together as CoSTAR, or the Autonomous Resilient Robots. They have designed a state-of-the-art Spot, powered by the NeBula (Networked Belief-conscious Perceptual Autonomy) system that makes it autonomous enough to successfully manage new environments, as shown in the DARPA Subterranean Robotics Challenge video above.

Until Au-Spot is ready for a mission, the CoSTAR team is putting it through the ranks here on Earth. As well as being up and down stairs and such, he has gone on field trips to Tulelake lava tubes of Northern California for some use on Mars-like ground and some cave exploration as well.

At the show, CoSTAR scientists said, “That behavior could one day allow revolutionary scientific missions to take place on Martian surfaces and subsurfaces, thus pushing the limits of NASA ‘s ability to study non – Martian sites. traditionally available. “