Space Symposium: On Mars, Expeditions will Need Better Robots

Today's roving robots are like preschoolers: Give them a defined task and, maybe, you can leave them alone for five minutes.

The Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity, for example, need teams of mission specialists to babysit them while they move across the Martian terrain. During the biennial solar conjunction, when communication signals to Mars are blocked by the Sun, the rovers sit tight while gathering data.

During the last communications blackout in October 2006, the engineers sent two weeks worth of detailed instructions, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's site:

While that may seem risky, automatic pilot has come a long way. Engineers have become skilled at letting spacecraft be on their own. Like parents who raise youngsters to be responsible and let them go on a short vacation with their friends, they've done all they can to ensure the voyagers will be healthy and safe.

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Spirit and Opportunity will scan the Martian sky for clouds, measure atmospheric dust, conduct chemical analysis of dust, rocks, and soils, and take pictures. Opportunity will join Spirit in staying put temporarily. Both rovers will store the data and transmit it to Earth later.

With the push for manned expeditions to the Moon and Mars, astronauts will need robots that can handle themselves for much longer while doing meaningful tasks, said Randall Black, an applications engineer at engineering giant Honeywell. At its booth, the company was demonstrating a robotics platform that can integrate data from a virtual model of the environment with that of its surroundings using primitive sight--such as sonar and infrared. The technique could allow a future rover to use a three-dimensional map of Mars to navigate on its own and avoid unforeseen obstacles using its robotic senses -- and performed its assigned tasks.

"The virtual world is a nice simulation and modeling environment, but the robot can also use it to figure out what to do," Black said.

Showing that robots can be more responsible may convince humans to trust the machines to be safe without supervision, he added.