Stereo Vision and Rover Navigation Software for Planetary Exploration

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 13:45:08 -0600, rk
wrote:

"Stereo Vision and Rover Navigation Software for Planetary Exploration"
http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/...navsw/aero.pdf

"...To be preceeded by the classic short film, 'Popeye vs The
Martians', also in 3-D!"

OM

--

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his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

rk wrote...
Interesting paper ...

From a new site too

"Stereo Vision and Rover Navigation Software for Planetary Exploration"
http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/...navsw/aero.pdf

... goes into an overview of the algorithms and their implementation,
looking at trades of the different architectures and implementations
as well as the use of hardened vs. non-hardened processors. As they
look at hardware support in general purpose processors, it would also
be interesting to extend this to more specialized processors or the
use of reprogrammable and reconfigurable gate array technology.
Actually, that's very interesting, in my opinion.

If it has enough memory, a quick response and gets cheap enough, will it
give me a computer with instant boot-up?

- Peter

rk wrote...
with snippage
http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/people/mwm/pubs.html

"Stereo Vision and Rover Navigation Software for Planetary Exploration"
S. Goldberg, M. Maimone, L. Matthies
IEEE Aerospace Conference
March 2002, pp. 2025-2036
Big Sky, Montana

Abstract
Finally, we summarize the radiation effects analysis that
suggests that commercial grade processors are likely to be
adequate for Mars surface missions, and discuss the level
of speedup that may accrue from using these instead of
radiation hardened parts.

I was surprised to find that the limit to traverse speed (~300 'steps' per
day) was computational power. Although the paper was written before
mission launch, it appears the vision processing is done on a rad-hardened
processor of limited processing power. The comparisons to modern chips
giving 'step' processing times of around one second involved using C++
under Windows.

Are the Mars rovers using a Windows operating system? And if so, surely
re-writing the routines in dedicated machine code would have a great
improvement on the speed of calculation. Anyway, by 2009 the chip speeds
will make this a moot point I guess..

- Peter

On 2005-03-27, Peter Smith wrote:

Are the Mars rovers using a Windows operating system? And if so, surely
re-writing the routines in dedicated machine code would have a great
improvement on the speed of calculation. Anyway, by 2009 the chip speeds
will make this a moot point I guess..

No. They are running vxworks from WindRiver IIRC.


Iain.

rk wrote...
Are the Mars rovers using a Windows operating system?
And if so, surely re-writing the routines in dedicated
machine code would have a great improvement on the
speed of calculation. Anyway, by 2009 the chip speeds
will make this a moot point I guess..

The rovers are running VxWorks on the RAD6000.


Not the world's fastest computer according to these googled stats:

The computer has a maximum clock rate of 25 MHz. In addition to the CPU
itself, the RAD6000 has 128 MB of error-detecting-and-correcting RAM. A
typical RTOS running on NASA's RAD6000 installations is VxWorks. A RAD6000
computer is reported to cost between US$200,000 and US$300,000.

RAD6000 is used on the following spacecraft:
Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers
Mars Pathfinder lander
Deep Space 1 probe
Mars Polar Lander
Mars Odyssey orbiter
Spitzer Infrared Telescope Facility
MESSENGER probe to Mercury

- Peter