Tuesday, October 15, 2002. Open in New Window
Theodore Blackmon: All right. Well, welcome to the NASA online robotics course. My name is thee or dor T. Blackmon. You can call me today. I'm going to be talking about the Mars Pathfinder mission. I'm looking forward to getting exciting questions from everybody out there in cyberspace. So let's go on to the beyond the introductory slide which I believe would then be slide number 1 in the course. This picture here gives an overview, and the first thing I want to do is to really provide you with an overview of with what we did on the Mars Pathfinder mission to more enable a more effective control of planetary rover, and part of the excitement that I certainly felt, and then we'll dive into more details specifically on the different components.
A major part of the Mars Pathfinder mission was the Sojourner Rover, and navigating a vehicle on another planet is a very difficult challenge to say at at leastst least. At best it's a very difficult challenge. And a significant aspect of enabling control of a remote robot, and particularly a planetary vehicle, robotic vehicle, was to build up a virtual model of the Pathfinder landing site, in real-time. So you could imagine as the rover was packaged up and sent and blasted off on a Delta 2 rocket off to Mars, and then the excitement of the landing, early after the landing, the whole difficulty of then figuring out where are you on Mars and enabling what we call telepresence, telepresence being the feeling of being there, meaning, you know, you can make yourself feel as if you're in a remote place. And NASA for more than a decade has really been advancing the state of the art in telepresent technologies so that you could rapidly take images and data from a remote environment collected by a robot, and then put that deat into a format so that humans here on Earth could have a sense of being there.
And that became a very significant part of what we did on the Mars Pathfinder mission was to rapidly, as soon as after the Sojourner touched down onto the surface of Mars with the Pathfinder lander, imagine taking very small pictures in a 360-degree view, sort of spinning around, and then having software so that these images taking around in a full 360-degree view could be rapidly seen together into one picture.
And so in the slide that you're looking at, sort of in the background is just a piece of that one picture, with the beautiful twin-peak mountains there on the horizon, and then there's some -- three screen shots in the middle, and as we've seen together those pictures -- string together those pictures into a panoramic mosaic, we were shipping the data from NASA JPL, back from Mars, shipping it through the Internet. And we actually leveraged there the next generation Internet, and so it had a very fast connection between NASA JPL up here to NASA Ames. But we had some very special software that could take those pictures, and then, from those pictures, automatically build up a three-dimensional model of the landing site.
And then we were able to take that three-dimensional model and go into the model, be able to make measurements, be able to record the traverse of the rover, be able to plan out moves through the rover, experiment, go into the model and figure out where we want to go.
And I'll go into more there in terms of why that's needed and why that's important. But it was very exciting, and I'd like to really get as much feedback and interest and questions coming in from the group. Just as a point of reference, are we supposed to wait till the end to then do the Q.A. section or ask questions in between?
So try to package up your questions and try to remember which slide we were on with the questions and then we can jump around.
Controlling remote robots. Let's go on to slide number 2, and I just want to make sure I'm synchronized. Is this slide number 2 on the Internet site, the controlling remote robots? Okay, so I want to be sure I'm saying the right slide here. I apologize for the --
NASA Moderator: That's actually slide number 3.
Theodore Blackmon: Okay, so it would be slide number 3, thank you. So slide number 3, "Controlling remote robots." I want to touch upon what are some of the challenges facing operators here on Earth in controlling robots, in particular, vehicular robots, on another planet.
And a significant aspect is time delay. The time it takes to send a signal from her to Mars is approximately 20 minutes. I'm not sure of exactly the exact time, but approximately 20 minutes. And that's a one-way signal. So sending the signal to Mars and then sending something back it would be a total of 40 minutes, at least. And that time delay makes it a very challenging problem. You may be familiar with some robotic missions that you may have seen here on Earth. For example, the Jason submersible which you can send under water. It's part of a robotic platform that's a submersible platform called an ROV, remotely operated vehicle, operated by the Woods Hall Oceanographic Institute. That discovered the titanic, and robots like that that can sent under water here on Earth or sent into other places here on Earth -- for example, inside nuclear reactors where maybe humans can't go -- there's not a very significant time delay.
So what does that mean? That means if you can see a picture, a video picture, you imagine having a camera on the robot and getting video pictures back, whenever you move the joystick or the mouse or whatever device is being used to command the remote vehicle, whenever you make an action, the action is transmitted immediately, the robot receives it, you can see the vehicle move in the video image in real-time, so as you're moving it, I say moving, you're seeing it move.
Well, what happens whenever you start to introduce time delay? Now, 20 minutes is a long amount, but even let's look at two seconds. Let's say you had a two second time delay, so that the time between sending the signal, having the robot move, seeing it on a video image, if it starts to exceed two seconds, what happens is you'll make a move but then you don't see it on the video for two seconds, and so you tend on overshoot, meaning you don't know when it stop. You may be going to the right, but the vehicle is farther to the right than what you think it is in the video image, and by the time you stop, it's gone too far so you may have gone past the screen.
And so that really develops instability in control. So then it becomes very difficult for humans to control, because you're constantly veering back and forth.
Now, part of my thesis work at U.C. Berkeley, my doctoral thesis was humans controlling robots, that was a really big part of it. As part of my Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley we looked at the effect of that time delay. And a real simple example was driving a car in a driving simulator. As we introduced time delay you can imagine going down a short curve, you know, and you're doing your curves, pretty soon you're going way to the right, and then way to the left, and you're really overshooting, and you can't keep the car on the road. And that's the effect of time delay.
Now, if you're trying to do 20 minutes away, that's very challenging, and that's one of the future development areas that NASA is very aggressively pursuing is how to put more automation onboard the robot so that you could command the robot to do things like go to that rock way off on the horizon, and it could figure out how to go there and do all the measurements. And that's future.
But right now, there's some level of smarts or intelligence on board the rover, but humans still have to be guiding a lot of the moves.
Another challenge is limited communication bandwidth. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, limited communication bandwidth means how much information can you send at one time? It's kind of like the same problem many people experience using the Internet. You know, you're downloading your images and they're coming in very slowly. Well, that's because you don't have a big pipe to send information. Whenever you're sending information to a robot on another planet, particularly wanting to get back information, there's a limited community bandwidth. You could only receive so much information on a daily basis.
And that's not a lot. And so the amount of information that you can use, it's not as if images are streaming back constantly. You're getting back -- you're able to maybe take, you know, even a panorama, as I explained before, one picture sweeping the room exceeds the amount of data that you can download in one day.
And so that's one of the other challenges, that you have very little pipe of bandwidth where you can transmit information. And the way the missions operate is by packaging up signals for let's say a day or multi-day sequence of operations, allowing the rover to operate, and then transmitting down as a batch a set of data in terms of images, science data, et cetera, that were captured while the robot's on the planet executing that sequence. And so you're not constantly transmitting information back and forth. It's kind of like you have a shot to send it information, and then you can receive some information back.
And then a big part of that which relates particularly to not only the time delay, but even more importantly, the limited communication, is really understanding the environment. You know, where are the rocks? Where are the interesting science things? Where might there be life? And building up that context, I mean you can imagine, if you're kind of looking at me here through this video picture, you know, you don't see what's behind me, you're not seeing the whole room. You don't really have that great of a sense of being in this room, which limits your ability to really understand how big is this room, what other interesting things are there around me? And even for the parts you do see, you're kind of seeing a plat picture, which really limits your understanding of the environment.
And as we're sending robotic vehicles to other planets in search of life and in search of interesting science, finding out and helping to discover and learn more about mysteries, of questions that we have here on Earth, really that becomes a key part of it. It's the human aspect of space exploration in advancing our understanding that is so important, and to have the human operators here on Earth have the best understanding of the information and the environment in which that information was collected is really a key part in controlling these remote robots for the missions that NASA is pursuing.
Now, for the Mars Pathfinder mission, if you go to the next slide, which would be slide 4, we put together a system where it helped to address some of those challenges by building a -- what we call a telepresence archive of the mission, and a telepresent image so as the lander touched down, the images, in stair owe, that was a key part of what we called a photo realistic 4D model. Now, why do I call it 4D? Well, 3D is space, and if you add time into the 3D, we're going to call that 4D. And so now it's a four-dimensional model where you can move inside of that environment, take a simulated copy of the rover, drive the rover over there, record where the rover has gone, and perform experiments.
And just immersing a user and an operator into that environment so that you can better see the shape of the rockets, the shape of where the lander touched down and the air bags around it, it was just a great capability but doesn't really help to enable a more improved distributed operations, where you can imagine a whole team of scientists working with operational specialists in trying to figure out where to send the robot to, what experiments to run, and the ability to go in and perform science analysis, making measurements on the rocks, measuring the wind tells behind the rocks, going in, determining the size and shape and locations of the rocks, giving that contextual understanding so as the rover was performing various experiments, you could understand in what context those experiments were being performed.
And then, finally, for assisting with the control of the rove sorry that those data sets, those stereo images could be used in the operations part of the mission to plan out the detailed commands of the rover, simulate those commands before they happen.
Go to the next slide, please, which would be slide 5 in the sequence titled, "Mars map stereo pipeline." This is a real key part, and I'm going to get into some of the details regarding the stereo pipeline. I'm going to again put your questions together, and I'll be real excited to answer them later.
A key part of this was enabling that computer model, that very high fidelity which is what we called photo-realistic meaning it looks like a photograph but going into a photograph and walking around in three dimensions.
The ability to do that was enabled by a piece of software technology developed here at NASA Ames called the stereo pipeline, and using this system, we took a set of stereo images.
And what I want you to do -- this is going to be kind of funny to have you do this remotely for the people awake out there -- if you close your left eye and then your right eye successfully and do it a little slower than I am doing, but you can see my open my right eye, open the left eye, right eye, and look at something off maybe five feet in the distance, you'll actually notice that that thing shifts, it moves a little bit. It moves -- so in the right eye, in the left eye, it moved to the left a little bit, in my leftite and it moved to the right a little bit in my right eye. And there's actually a point at which that difference between a feature point, meaning if you look at some feature out -- even like your hand, you can put your hand out in space and shift your left and right eye, and you can see that it looks like it's moving a little bit. Well, that difference we call disparity, and that's the technical word, is that there's a disparity or a difference between some object point in the plane of the left image versus the right image so by putting two cameras on board a robot, very similar to how the human brain works, those images, given some angle that they may be pointed ought, directly out versus tilted in a little bit, features out will appear at a different point in the left and right image.
Well, we can write computer programs that will then take those feature points and take a feature point in the left image and find it in the right image, and then do that for every single point in the image. So take -- going through every point in the left image, seeing where is that point in the right image, builds up what we call what's in the middle of that image on slide number 5 called a disparity map, and then there's equations that can be applied to then take that disparity map where that difference in pixels being some measure, equates to a distance from the camera.
So now you've got an ability to go from where your camera is and measure how far away something is. And if you do that for all the points in the image you can think of building up a surface mesh, which is a set of connected points saying, "Well, what is the shape? Which would what would be the shape of my shoulders, my head?" You've probably seen some of this in various -- maybe different computer web sites. This is some pretty novel technology where you're able to go from stereo images taken on board a robot or some other imaging system and then convert that into a mesh.
Now, if you imagine doing that for hundreds of pictures in a 3D environment, sort of panning around, doing that for all images that you can take, you can then build up a computer model of the whole surroundings.
Now, a real fantastic part of this is that then you take that image where you were measuring the disparity from, your evident image, and you paste it onto the surface mesh.
Now, the effect it has is that if you put the viewpoint in a computer, 3D computer program, almost like a video game, if you put the viewpoint where the camera was, it looks just like the photo.
And then if you move away from where the camera is, the image doesn't warp, it starts to look as if you're driving through this photograph, and then you can come up and feel almost as if you're going to touch something there that has a three-dimensional shape. And there's some really great technologies. We didn't use all of these technologies on the Mars Pathfinder mission, but technologies that allow you to come in with a stylus and actually run it over the surface of that computer model, technologies that allow you to use hapt.
P4: Cs which are forced feedback devices to sort of feel the way the rover might move through that environment. Now you've got an ability to take a computer model of your spacecraft (haptics) and put it into that 3D environment and then use it to both record things that have happened as well as to project and plan things into the future. So let's go on to the next slide. This would be slide number 6, I believe, called the telepresence archive.

So if you go here there's actually a really great web site as part of the Mars Pathfinder mission where we used this concept in 3D, extended it to some web pages in 2D, I'll go to that later, but you see the little labels out there saying A2, A3, and then you see a rover that's looking back towards the rock, and then you see the image in black and white that the rover took of that rock with this three-dimensional model where the three-dimensional model was taken from the lander. So sort of in the left side of the picture you see a picture of the lander. That's the one that had the stereo cameras, so the lander was doing the stereo imaging to create this model. Meanwhile, the rover, as it went around, we could take its camera image and really look down at the surface features. And you can think of it almost as creating what we called this archive, which is like a time history of the mission.
And so if we wanted to know where were the various alpha proton x-ray experiments, the rover had a science instrument called an alpha proton x-ray spectrometer, APXS. So we put little markers, text markers in 3D with A1, A2, A3, A4 showing where the rover had taken these various science instruments, then you could come into the computer model, click on one of those icons, and it would take you to that science data.
And so this performs, then, this is where that element of time, that 4D information is now being encoded into that computer model, and we're calling that the telepresence archive and then putting those images of the rover. Something really interest in terms of the future -- I like to think about the future and what's next and what are some of the challenges that, you know, even some of you out there online might solve one day and help bring to NASA is, boy, it would have been great to have a similar stereo imaging technique on board the rover, and some of the future NASA missions will attempt to achieve that. I'm not sure of the exact nature of what will be coming up in terms of the imaging systems and the technology, but the goal would be wouldn't it be great if you could take stereo images from the rover in that position and then continue to add it to this map? So as the rover goes from one position to the next, and it can go behind a rock to the side, it continued to build up this computer environment model of its surroundings. And then even one day you might think of not just sending that data back here to Earth, but also using it to enable a higher degree of intelligence on board the rover itself, so that the rover could build up this computer model and then begin to reason about the world, reason about where does it want to place this instrument, where might it navigate, where are the rocks, where are the hazards that it needs to avoid.
And so you begin to see how close we are as a technology community, spearheaded by NASA, and advancing this capability where robotic vehicles, one day you might be able to just say, hey, I want to go to that rock off in the distance, and then go there, investigate the surrounding area, and tell me, send back to me what's interesting and just give me the highlights.
Right now that ability for the robot to be able to determine what's interesting, self-navigate itself over long distances, and then send back the highlights is not achievable, but one day it will be. And so this is sort of a glimpse of the future.
Now, this is a picture of that same landing site here in black and white taken from above. Now, you imagine, these are images were all gathered pond the lander, the Mars Pathfinder lander being in the center of the picture, that was the spacecraft that took all the images, but by creating this three-dimensional model, we were able to project a nearly true projection from above.
Now, you may see different green areas. I've gone on -- I apologize -- I've gone on to slide number 8, "Internet access." You'll see green areas in the picture where those green areas is where you couldn't see behind the rocks so that the imaging systems couldn't see behind the rocks. And then there's some icons that we've embedded into these overhead maps that were formed out of this telepresence archive. And I've included a web link down on the bottom that you can go to after the course and go in and look at these.
And one of the really neat ones, is you go there, we've put the rover movies in there. So as the rover was performing its navigational traverses across the terrain, we're imaging it with the Pathfinder lander and creating movies. So these were some of the first interplanetary movies on the surface of another planet. And that's really exciting. And this is still -- this web site is still up, it's part of the Mars Pathfinder web site. It was a way to provide Internet access, current technology in terms of the Internet just doesn't have the bandwidth and a lot of the computers out there today just still don't have the speed to run these full three-dimensional models where you can walk through.
Now, that's rapidly changing. 1997, a little over five years now since the Pathfinder lander touched down, the computers we were running this on were very expensive. Just to enable the ability to walk through the surface of Mars and image the surface of Mars in this high resolution, talking about gigabytes of data, took a computer that nearly cost half a million dollars. It's a lot of money. Today, that same level of capability can be achieved on a computer for 00:57:13.152,500. Now, the computer. If you bought a computer last year or the year before, it may not have that capability, but you go on to a standard computer store and you get a high-end graphics card, it's really the graphics cards that have become such a difference, plus the processing power on board the CPUs of modern PCs. So it's now possible to be able to take this level of imaging technology and enable a much broader distribution. For the Mars Pathfinder mission, we also posted some of the 3D model that see we built, but they were in very low resolution, and really didn't give the same quality of feeling as if you were there on the surface of Mars.
And so we look forward to the future missions where that information can be distributed out to everybody out there with such great interest, you know, I think it's really the public and all the enthusiasm that there is shared for NASA and NASA's mission that tends to make this feel so special. You know, exploring other planets just fascinates children, and that's one of the things I really like about it was that ability to get the information out there to the public, engage the public and involve the public more directly in NASA's missions, and especially these missions where we're touching down on the surface of another planet, and it's very exciting.
And so there will be two additional rovers being sent in 2003. Those will be touching down sometime in 2004, if all goes well, and that's going to be a lot of excitement. There's going to be similar imaging systems used where the three-dimensional models can be built up and I'm really looking forward to enabling the public to be able to walk through the surface of Mars as the NASA scientists and operators did at Mission Control for the Mars Pathfinder mission.
Another one of the areas that we began to really explore both during the Pathfinder mission and then even beyond on some of the additional field tests and technology development efforts that went here, went on here at NASA Ames was using this virtual environment to enable more sophisticated science analysis and development of goals for the rover. So the idea being, that three-dimensional model, if you look at one of the major science deliverables from the Mars Pathfinder mission, it was determining the distribution and size of the rocks at the landing site.
And so using the software, the Mars map software that was developed and implemented on Mars Pathfinder mission, the scientists were able to very rapidly go in and measure the location and sizes of the rocks around the landing site.
One of the interesting things that they discovered there is the Pathfinder landing site was a floodplain zone, so there was an ancient floodplain that came sweeping down through the valley. And as you looked at the rocks and the distribution of rocks they found that there was a very uniform distribution of larger rocks going to smaller rocks. You might think as a floodplain is sort of coming out and the water is running downstream, larger rocks would be deposited further upstream and the smaller rocks would be continued to be carried further downstream. And as we went in and performed those rock measurements, we were able to measure over 1,500 rocks in a single weekend. And if you look back 20 years ago during the Viking mission, you know, it took years to achieve the same capability with humans going in and having to make the measurements in stereo images. They did have stereo images, but humans had to go up and match up those feature points, determine the location and measurements of the various points in aninal and then to use that to make measurements, it took them an extremely long time. And so the ability to perform the science analysis within the virtual environment, and then the ability to go in and use it as a tool so that the scientists can get the data remotely through the Internet and use it on their own computers, and going and beginning to plan out what they want the rover to do.
We used the system at Mission Control in that fashion, but it required the scientist to get involved in that virtual environment to be at Mission Control, and for the NASA's future missions, they're really looking to enable a better distributed control where the scientists can be at their home institutions for an extended period of time and still be very heavily engaged in that planning within that virtual environment.
If we go on to the next slide, "Command planning and simulation," the other aspect is then taking the computer model of the rover and performing as you determine what goals you want to achieve, having the rover be able to simulate itself driving through that environment and first performing that here on Earth and then enable that to be performed on board the rover. And that takes another level of fidelity in terms of the simulation where you're simulating the energy, which is another very difficult part of remote control and enabling planetary exploration is having adequate energy to perform all of the tasks. It takes a lot of energy to move. And as you're performing movements and as you're wanting to run science experiments, making sure that you're able to simulate out the energy consumption as part of these navgations and being able to do that into this realistic virtual environment.
So I think, if I go on to the next slide of, I've actually gone through the slide sets pretty quickly, and I've done that somewhat purposely. We've got a half hour into the lecture, and I like to get engaged with questions from the audience and everybody out there online. So thank you for listening. I'm really glad I got to share some of the experiences and look to go into a Q&A session.
NASA Moderator: Okay, great. We are getting some questions in already, and let me take a look, first of all, from Cybernetica, asks, "How do you work around the problem of image and perspective distortions in 3D surface topography?"
Theodore Blackmon: That's a very good question. And, you know, the question really has to do with as you move away, I mentioned before you make a three-dimensional model from a camera at this location, and if you put the viewpoint in 3D from this location, it looks exactly like the image, but as you move around, and you can imagine if I put this water bottle out there, if I had a three-dimensional model, I would get the three-dimensional model of the front surface, really what you would see in terms of the image being this surface here, but I'm not going to get something. You can't see my finger. And particularly as my finger here is going towards the side -- And I'm not sure, are they seeing my image right now? So as the finger is going towards the side, near the side of this Calistoga bottle water, you wouldn't have a three-dimensional model coming from this side as opposed to imaging it from the front. And so that distortion as you move in that environment -- you know, what we did was we were able to determine the accuracy of the model by running experiments here on Earth with the same imaging system and determined at what angle of perspectives as we move to the side, we could trust the data. And at some point we would have holes in the data. I showed before the picture from overhead where you had holes. And so being able to handle that image distortion, it was not an exact science, but we had to use our best judgment. We were able to, again, determine that up to ten meters away we had a sub-centimeter accuracy, as long as the features of the environment were within a 30-degree frame of view, and then it back -- so as an object goes from being zero degrees to 30 degrees, it started to drop off. I don't remember the exact distortion metrics, but whenever we measured the features of rocks, we were able to get those statistics right out of the software telling us what the accuracy of that measurement point was.
NASA Moderator: Okay I have a question here from Eric, and you may have somewhat answered it, but I think maybe it bears asking. Eric says, "Why didn't you equip Pathfinder with a better bandwidth?"
Theodore Blackmon: That's a good question. I don't have an exact answer. The bandwidth, it actually isn't as much a restriction from the Pathfinder mission as it is the deep space network. And I'm not an expert on the deep space network, but the deep space network -- but I'll try to do the best I can to answer the question. The Deep Space Network serves a large number of missions. And so there's a set of satellite dishes strategically placed here on Earth and a set of relay communications satellite systems in space, that then collect signals and transmit signals to the different space exploration missions underway. And so a space exploration mission like Mars Pathfinder has to negotiate for some time on that Deep Space Network. And that Deep Space Network itself is limited.

And so until there's more funding or more infrastructure put into the communication network, there's a certain amount of signal that can be transmitted, and then that signal needs to be shared across a large number of missions.
Now, it actually just so happened that during the Mars Pathfinder mission, after the first two days that NASA decided to increase the bandwidth for the mission, and I don't remember by how much it was increased, but the original amount of bandwidth that we were going to have over the Deep Space Network then actually became more, and so we were able to collect more images and downlink more data. And for this high-resolution imaging, that was very exciting. But it's more of a limitation of that Deep Space Network, and it's again one of those areas where there's room for improvement into the future.
You know, it would be wonderful to just stream high-resolution video sequences taken from these robotic devices, and that's something that, you know, we just need better technology, better compression techniques, just more sophisticated hardware.
NASA Moderator: Okay, Daniel asks a related question. He says, "If the panoramic view takes more bandwidth to send than the maximum amount allowed in one day, what are the specific tricks your team used to squeeze data through the transmissions?"
Theodore Blackmon: Compression being one of the heavy tricks, and if you're familiar with some of the image compression techniques you can do nonuniform image compression techniques. Meaning if you go to places in the image where it's pretty flat, like, again, if I use the example of this image here, there's more texture and more features in my face and surrounding area than in the wall, than in the wall right behind me, they're pretty uniform.
And so you can then compress more heavily in the areas where there's less information and compressed less in features that you might be more interested in. And so having that type of sophisticated compression algorithms. There's also a really hot technique used on the Mars Pathfinder mission that I'll go into some description on called superresolution imaging, and the basic idea is if you point a camera at something, and you jiggle the camera a few times, you move it around and you take 25 images, you can kind of sum up those images by actually making a computer model of the camera.
If you think about a pixel in an image, that pixel in an image doesn't represent some point out in space, but rather, it's a distribution of various surface features of objects. And so researchers here at NASA Ames have developed a very exciting technique where they use an actual computer model of the camera and how the camera works to then combine multiple pictures that can be taken. So like on Twin Peaks, we went and imaged Twin Peaks and kind of jiggled the camera a little bit, transmitted back 25 images, and we were able to get a very high-resolution picture of Twin Peaks, whereas the rest of the panorama was in lower resolution, so we can use sort of very, very interesting techniques like that to increase the resolution in certain spots.
NASA Moderator: Okay. Leornian, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, asks, "What are the camera lenses made of, and the protective covering of the solar cells?"
Theodore Blackmon: That's a good question. I don't have the direct information in terms of the camera lenses, but I can say that on the Mars Pathfinder mission for the Pathfinder lander, it actually had 14 different filters that could take images in different spectral wave lengths, which enables the landing site terrain to not just be viewed in this very nice color as I presented it on the presentation, but you could go in and look at various spectral wave lengths which allows you to understand better what the rocks are made of, what mineral composition the rocks are made of. And in terms of the material, the specific material of the lenses, don't have the exact answer for that, but one of the very realistic aspects of Mars in terms of in terms of operating robots there is the sandstorms. And I know that the lander also had to have protective shields for the camera system so in the event of a sandstorm where the sand comes through and gets swept up off the ground and you get these really violent sandstorms, there's dust devils and various names that have developed for them, you need to be able to shield those cameras from those sandstorms or else the lenses would get blasted.
And so in terms of what the lens was made of, I'm not sure, but I know that it was very important to have a shielding mechanism for the camera systems so that the shield can be brought down in the event of a sandstorm.
NASA Moderator: Okay. Bovine Oaks asks, "How close was your computer map to the actually landscape, and were there any hidden objects behind others as the rover moved around?"
Theodore Blackmon: In terms of how close it was to the actual landscape, I'll go back to the first question, and it relates to that, my answer there. We, in terms of building up this computer model, we tested the software here on Earth and found that up to ten meters away from the landing -- from the camera, which was on the lander there, so up to ten meters away from the lander, our measurement and model was up to one centimeter accurate.
Now, as we go around to the side of objects, we didn't have that accuracy on the side of the objects because the camera, again, isn't really seeing the features on the side, it's seeing the features on the front. And so we didn't have that data. And as the rover went around rocks we also had to image the area between rocks, and really tried to operate -- we were very careful about sending the rover into areas that we didn't have good data from, from the lander images. And so we did capture some images of the rover looking behind some of the areas like the sand dune area and some of the other areas on the landing site, but we were careful about sending the rover into areas that we couldn't see. And so the next rover mission will have a similar imaging system that was on the lander but on board the rover itself so as it begins to move around, it can then do the stereo panoramic imaging and enable it to go into areas so that the map buildup isn't from a single place.
Now, it would be really neat to think that there are some undiscovered things behind the rocks. And I've, you know, just -- there's all kind of ideas you can come up with in terms of what we weren't able to see. I don't know if some of you have seen My Favorite Martian, the movie, they had a little sequence showing a similar rover to the Mars Pathfinder going over the terrain and it's not finding anything, and you're seeing this barren landscape of rocks, and it's searching for life, and then it kind of -- the mission is over and it dies out and then right over the hill is where the great cities were on Mars. I'm not suggesting that's actually the case. That was sort of Hollywood, but that idea that, you know, with such limited communication bandwidth and the difficulty in exploring, you're not able to explore every part of the planet. But that's also, you know, one of the primary motivators for NASA gearing up for a human mission to Mars, which would really be a combined robotic and human mission to Mars, as they look at some of the various mission scenarios, one of the very realistic constraints is if you would take all that time to send a human to Mars, in terms of both the cost and the ability to do things while you're there, you'd really want to have an ability to robotically build the habitats and landing base for the mission to Mars.
And so there's a lot of technology development and advancement that needs to go on there for those out there enthused about robotic technology and interested in getting involved in the development. It's just so much more to do.
NASA Moderator: Okay, Jenny would like to know, a propos to what you've been talking about, how large an area did the Pathfinder rover cover during the mission?
Theodore Blackmon: So the Pathfinder rover primarily stayed around the lander. And again, it was largely due to this inability to get those broader pictures around it, plus the rover was communicating with the lander. So there was a communication relay from the rover to the lander. So the rover never competed beyond -- I don't remember the exact maximum distance, but it didn't go much more than 15 meters away from the lander. It basically circled around the lander. One of the important things to remember about this mission, which, again, being five years ago, isn't well advertised, it was primarily -- the mission was primarily set up to test whether or not for a -- you know, it was part of NASA's faster, better, cheaper. Can we even get to Mars in the faster, better, cheaper paradigm. Some of the missions, the Viking mission, for example, was just so much more expensive during the seventies to touchdown two landers on Mars, and this mission was run for under the cost -- remember, during that summer, there was another movie, Water World or something like that, and the cost of making that blockbuster movie was more than the cost, the end-to-end cost of the design, the development, the launch, the landing, and execution of the Mars Pathfinder mission, under $250 million. And so for that low-cost budget, they're really looking, can you just get on Mars and begin to drive something? There wasn't a lot of money or emphasis put on the scientific exploration of the planet.
And so the original mission scenario had the rover operating for about a week. But we were able to keep it up and operating for over 80 days. And so for over 80 days we explored various rocks and areas around the landing site. But the ability to have the rover do more with the same amount of information up-link so that it can do more navigation by itself is one of the future development areas, again, that NASA is very aggressively working on is being able to have a command up-link ciling then have the rover do more autonomous exploration over the planet itself. Overthose 80 days it would take a few days to get it positioned against a rock to perform the experiment. But again you can imagine the challenge of just making it happen, very sophisticated and challenging.
NASA Moderator: Great. Julian wants to know how long does it take for engineers on Earth to work on data from Mars and come up with a surface mesh?
Theodore Blackmon: Oh, that's great question. I guess I didn't emphasize that enough. Our system turned around those surface meshes in minutes. And so from 20 minutes from the time of taking that full panorama, it took us that time to send the information up here from NASA JPL in southern California to NASA Ames in northern California, automate that stereo pipeline so it could automatically match up the features, produce the mesh, send that data back down to Mission Control, that was a 20-minute time frame. So within 20 minutes we were walking around on the surface of Mars.
Speaker: That's terrific. Matt wants to know when you think we would develop faster-than-light communication.
Theodore Blackmon: Well, that's a -- in terms of the theoretical physics behind faster-than-light communication, I'm not saying it's impossible, but certainly beyond what we currently know. Don't have a good answer for that. I wouldn't even speculate. You know, something that could -- you're looking almost at achieving some type of time travel or hypersonic travel. And those are those exciting areas, you know, you kind of see it on Star Trek and on some of the television shows and, you know, you want to think it's reality, but, you know, we've never seen something travel faster than the speed of light. It's certainly -- I don't like to think so limited, though. Wouldn't it be exciting if you could get some signal to be sent faster than the time it actually takes to transmit light.
NASA Moderator: Okay. Jacquelyn wants to know, "Why was so much in the rover devoted to imaging as opposed to sampling audio, et cetera?"
Theodore Blackmon: That's neat. The sounds on Mars. Well, as humans, we're very visual creatures. You know, some of the estimates are that 80% of what we learn is through imagery, but other senses like sound are so important. And there really wasn't that much audio sampling. One of the future missions they're looking at putting a microphone on board and doing some better sampling, but there wasn't just imaging. I should emphasize that some of the other interesting scientific experiments, one of them was some atmospheric experiments where it measured wind speeds and temperatures. One of the very interesting things that I learned, and I'm always learning, I learned so much on this mission, and I just don't even know that much. But one of the things I learned, that just fascinated me, is that the temperature difference. You know, the Mars Pathfinder mission was the first time we were able to, at a very high speed, measure temperatures. So if you can imagine, you know, this being the surface of Mars, and having a temperature instrument there, and then something at three meters, and something around at six meters, that just over the difference -- imagine if you're standing on Mars, your feet, it might feel like a very cold winter day, and then up to your belly area, it would be absolutely freezing. And so there was like a 30- to 40-degree temperature difference between the surface and close to the surface to about a meter above the surface. And the difference was because of the very thin atmosphere. And so with a very thin atmosphere, you know, you've got heat radiating and being absorbed by solar energy hitting the planet, the planet absorbing that heat and then giving off the heat, but that there's not much of an atmosphere to keep the heat there. So just a few feet above the surface you've got a huge temperature difference, very much colder. And then even the time, and so then if you imagine a single point over just a few seconds, it would be fluctuating by 20 to 30 degrees. That's just like, wow, you know, you just wouldn't expect that. And it would be just really neat to get some other data collected about Mars and sound. Although I don't know all of the science about how well sound would be picked up in that type of atmosphere, either.
NASA Moderator: Okay, Lee Yang wants to know if there's any next generation of Pathfinder.
Theodore Blackmon: Yes, the Mars 2003. There's the Mars exploration rovers, actually sending two rovers to two different areas, and NASA is really beginning to put up the search for life. And it's almost where would you might best find evidence of life. If life something exist or did once exist on Mars, it's very much thought to be under the surface. There's now evidence that Mars was inhabited by water and that a permanent a frost layer of water, there's how thought in the scientific community that, you know, I mean we can't say without a question of a doubt, but that there is water in permafrost layers, particularly water layers under the surface. And so they're really wanting to Gephardt under the surface but the next set of rovers in 2003, NASA will blast off two rovers to the surface, and they'll be landing sometime in 2004, and there will be future versions, future generations of the Pathfinder and Sojourner rover, but it's almost as if the capability of the lander is now going to be put to some extent on board the rover, so that the rover will have that sophisticated imaging system, and the rover will be able to put up a mast, and then image from -- the rover let's say is a foot and a half, two feet high -- it's going to have an ability to put a mast up and have its own panoramic imaging system, with an ability to do a much longer traverse.
So rather than staying in one spot, the mission will be able to go to multiple spots.
Now, unfortunately, from my perspective -- I thought it would be really neat if they were sending the [RO-EFRSZ] to the same place and the rovers will act as a team and see each other but they're actually going to send the rovers to different places. That's largely driven from scientific interest because there's so many places of interest to go on the surface, that by having two rovers, it's thought best to send them to two different areas and have those rovers begin to scout out, you know, can they find some places where it might be probable to look for life for next missions where they could send something that could drill down below the surface and do subsurface sampling. That's one of the hot areas is how do you enable these rovers and these robotic vehicles to actually sample something under the surface?
NASA Moderator: Okay. I have a question here from Chris that says, "And what is the resolution of the images?"
Theodore Blackmon: The Pathfinder images were 256 by 256 pixels apiece, and then a complete panorama was made up of about -- boy, exact numbers -- I believe the total panorama, which was four levels of images, which would give you about a thousand pixels high, and was about 28 images across the full 360-degree view, which would give you -- you know, that would be -- if you had 256 by 10 would be 2,500, times 3 would be about 7,500 pixels throughout the whole circle.
Now, in comparison to the next mission, the next imaging system is going to be of significantly higher resolution. I mean if you think about this, that pixel resolution of maybe a thousand pixels high, that's not much more than your computer screen. You don't get that much in terms of, you know, the quality of the images. Yes, it looks like a photo, but if you want to really get detail and enable better scientific ability to understand and observe features, you need to be able to have a higher resolution imaging system.
Now, of course that's confounded by the bandwidth problem. I mean if you tried to do a panorama with the full bandwidth of the camera systems going on on the next Mars Exploration Rover missions, you just can't transmit all that data down at once. So developing these algorithms so that you can more intelligently compress the data in certain locations is a very significant part of the upcoming mission, is how do you intelligently determine what to transmit because the cameras are going to be of such high resolution.
There's also a microscopic imager which is really neat. You can come up to the rocks and look at the rocks very close and get microscopic detail on some of the surface features.
NASA Moderator: Chris follows up that question with another one in which he asks, "Why were the images only in black and white, and doesn't that severely limit the data that can be recovered?"
Theodore Blackmon: The images were actually -- I mentioned before, the Pathfinder lander had 14 spectral filters, and three of those filters were of the wavelength of red, green, and blue light, which then enabled us to produce the color images that I was showing in the presentation. And so we did have color images from the lander. The rover camera systems were not in color. Why that was a particular choice early on in the mission design, I don't have the exact answer on. I think that the color adds a lot. Certainly it also adds more data to transmit back, and it probably adds more cost, or not probably, it certainly adds more cost onto the mission. And so during those -- you know, you've got to make a lot of tough decisions. And doing something like this as well as you just learn other things in life, there's always a trade-off, there's always gives and takes. If you have a certain budget, determining where exactly you want to spend the money, and do you want to spend more money on a better color system, color camera system onboard the rover, well, for the Pathfinder mission it was opted not to use it. For the next rover missions they will have color cameras for the panoramic imaging system, but for the some of the rover nav garble cameras. The camera systems that the Sojourner and rover had were primarily for navigation, although during the mission scientists certainly used them for looking at the rocks. And I kept thinking the same thing is, "Boy, I wish those were in color."
NASA Moderator: Okay, yes. John asks, "What is the most important lesson you learned on the Pathfinder mission that will help you in further exploration of Mars?" (Navigational.)
Theodore Blackmon: You need something to wipe the dust off of your cameras and your solar cells on your instruments. That was one of the biggest lessons learned. If you looked at the amount of dust in the Mars atmosphere, Mars is one dusty place. You really don't see it in the images, but, boy, you could really pick it up. And over the course of those 80 days the amount of dust that collected on the surface of the rover where you've got your solar cells and you're trying to replenish your energy, you're just getting layered with dust. And so if you're trying to do a long-term exploration with a robotic vehicle, you need some kind of mechanism to clean that dust off.
The other one was the instrument, the alpha proton x-ray spectrometer. It kept getting readings that were very similar in terms of what rock composition was measured. And one of the thoughts during the mission was you plopped it down onto the surface. All that surface dust comes up into the instruments. And so that's one of the lessons learned from the Mars Pathfinder mission was, you know, how do you enable your instruments to not get so easily contaminated and your solar panels to not get very clogged up with that dust, and how do you deal with that, Mars being such a dusty environment?
NASA Moderator: Okay. Angel asks, "What type of remote control and receiving systems are you using? And also, how powerful are the ways of sending and receiving signals?"
Theodore Blackmon: Oh, that's actually -- I don't have good numbers, but if you go to www -- no, it's Mars.JPL.nasa.gov, and you'll have to fish through some links, but if you go to Path missions and you finally go to the Mars Pathfinder web site, there will be aling over to the rover operations team web page that has better statistics on the communication strength of the relay signal. The basic architecture was that the Deep Space Network talked to the lander, the land communicates with the Deep Space Network. The Deep Space Network communicates with satellites that ultimately are received on satellite dishes sitting here on Earth. That information then gets piped over to NASA JPL, and then the rover on Mars, the rover is communicating to the lander. And so the exact details of the strength of those communications signals, I don't have the immediate answer for, but there's some good information online.
NASA Moderator: Okay, Buzz would like to know how many programmers are involved in creating an autonomous navigation program.
Theodore Blackmon: If you look at NASA and developing an autonomous navigation program, you know, you can really accomplish a lot with a small team of three to four people working on the various subelements. And, you know, to discuss what some of those programmers might be doing, one key part is having an ability to sense and observe the environment, and then from your sensor readings, predict and somehow monitor the state of the vehicle. You've got another thing which is an ability to reason about the environment, make the model of your terrain, determine where your obstacles are, and then be able to plan actions, perhaps not just for navigation but then also do some reasoning about arm placement, placement of sensors, and that planning level. Then you've got another major level which is going to be coordinating that activity. You might think of that in terms of your executive level control, being able to talk to the module that's looking at the sensor information, monitoring the help, being able to coordinate over with your planning and your ability to reason about the environment and then make plans of your next actions, and meanwhile, knowing what you want to do in terms of your goals, and then determining and decomposing your goals down into particular actions and states.
And so to develop a sophisticated rover autonomy architecture, you're looking at, at minimum, three or four core developers, then having some support staff working on various other aspects.
NASA Moderator: Okay, I think Nick is asking a related question when he asks, "Was there some sort of autonomy in Pathfinder, for instance, crash detection?"
Theodore Blackmon: Yes, there was but it was very limited. And one of the real constraints in the missions are if you think about Pathfinder landing in 1997, that means it had to blast off in 1996, you need to have all your subsystems in terms of hardware and software coming together, you know, a year or so earlier, to be tested and gone through all of its debugging, testing, and then locking it down. So you're really looking at early 1990's technology that flew on the Mars Pathfinder mission in terms of the intelligence onboard.
Now, what we were able to accomplish with the images here on Earth in '97 was a lot more, but that technology didn't exist in the early nineties to a state where it could be easily incorporated, especially in terms of the computing power that was required on board the rover platform. But it did have some autonomy, and it did -- and the Pathfinder mission did test soft autonomous navigation. One aspect was a laser-striping system. If you imagine sort of sending a laser beam out here, and let's say that this was a rock in your way, and a laser beam could come straping across the surface of this rock, your beam would sort of shift, where you'd see objects that were sticking above the terrain. So if you're just having a flat surface, the laser beam would be a line in the image, but it's shifted in the rocks. And so it was a technique where that laser striping system could be turned on and then that way the rover could detect whether there were rocks right in front of it, and it could automatically stop the rover if it had that rock.
There was also some capability to give a point some distance out and upload a set of waypoints and then have the rover drive and guide itself through those points, and there were some experiments that we ran in terms of evaluating those autonomous navigation techniques, but they weren't very sophisticated, and the level of autonomy required for the future NASA rover missions is going to need to be much more sophisticated than the autonomy on the Mars Pathfinder mission.
NASA Moderator: Okay, John asks, "If you could have added an additional technology to the Pathfinder, what would it have been?"
Theodore Blackmon: Hmm. Let me ponder that for a second. An additional technology to the Pathfinder. Hmm.
I don't know. What are some of the thoughts out there? I'd love to hear from some of the other people in the audience. Let's pose that question out to everybody. Is that possible to do?
NASA Moderator: They are listening to you now. Perhaps they'll respond in the chat room.
Theodore Blackmon: Yeah, what were some of the -- if you could put some additional technology on board the Pathfinder and some additional technology, what would it have been? A drill is something that I thought would be very great, and they're certainly working on that for future missions. One of the concepts I've got is a subsurface explorer, which would be like a little anvil that could drill itself. So you think of drilling, you think of this big thing going down, weight and energy being such a constraint, can you develop something that could sort of home itself down into the ground and then look for things under the ground.
Now, we heard one thing which was sound and putting microphones and being able to measure, record, and transmit back sound. There were no experiments on board to try to hunt for life. What are some of the other things we're getting from the audience?
NASA Moderator: Okay, we haven't gotten response yet, but we'll keep an eye open and see what happens.
Let's handle a question here from Dr. Cummings. "Do you envision students having opportunities to control future rovers' movements or cameras?"
Theodore Blackmon: I do. I absolutely do. And actually myself hoping to be part of that in terms of being able to tie live into NASA missions, get those images and data, and then get it out in a broader distribution format to students, and students not only in K through 12, but also at a university level where they might be able to go in and participate as remote and extended part of a NASA mission team.
Will they actually have their hands on the controls? Unlikely in the missions coming up, but there are opportunities in terms of NASA's educational outreach programs where students can become and participate actively in NASA, robotic field tests here on Earth, as well as opportunities like the next rover mission. And, you know, in terms of what I really -- excites me is that thought that one day you might have a collective group across the nation being able to go in and, you know, in some fashion determine how they -- where and how they like the rover to move, then actually be able to send that information to NASA and have it execute an action for a planetary rover.
NASA Moderator: Great. Okay. Quicksilver wants to know, were all the programmers from NASA, or did NASA hire some people?
Theodore Blackmon: You know, NASA has both programmers that are internal and there are also -- you know, a mission team is not just comprised of NASA employees. You know, NASA is a central part, but there's various people on the team that were from universities, other science institutions that come together for a mission. You know, the way NASA operates is, NASA will have an opportunity for some mission, but then an independent set of group -- an independent team will propose a particular mission architecture. And so for the next upcoming rover mission, the MER's 2003 mission, the principal investigator is from Cornell University. And his team is not only made up of Cornell but made up of a very strong team of both scientists and rover experts who are going to be working with NASA in terms of enabling that next mission. And so not everybody on the mission will work for NASA.
NASA Moderator: Okay, I think this is related. Alex is asking, but not necessarily the repetition here, "Have you gotten any help from other teams working on similar projects?"
Theodore Blackmon: Yes. And, you know, a big part of, you know, NASA is again extending the collaborative effort. You know, there's activities going on at the Department of Defense, very great activities going on at various universities. The group I worked with at NASA, here at NASA Ames, was called the Intelligent Mechanisms Group. And we were working with scientists at Stanford universities, some scientists at Carnegie Mellon, some scientists and technologists at University of California Berkeley, and other institutions. And then pulling together the technology and tying it into an integrated system. The biggest challenge in robotics is integration. There's been so much work done on various subsystems, but the hard part is pulling it all together, making all those pieces work, and then enabling some higher level of intelligence in terms of what those systems can achieve, just make it go all work together is so hard, and then trying to put more, increased, and better autonomy. You know, it really goes from not the autonomy at a subsystem level, buts the higher level intelligence and coordination. And that's a big challenge. And so, you know, having -- you know, NASA is very much -- actively works with other institutions in collaborating on technology development.
NASA Moderator: Okay, I have some answers for you here.
Theodore Blackmon: Oh, this is from the questions.
NASA Moderator: Right. Robocop says, yeah -- talking about new fuel cells, they would work well but probably give a longer life than solar batteries. And Cybernetica says better energy sources and low-power electronics so Pathfinder would have operated much more time. And I guess, let's see, we have -- oh, got a whole bunch of them there.
Theodore Blackmon: The energy, those are outstanding replies in terms of energy being such a big issue.
NASA Moderator: Okay, our RHF students say jumping mechanism.
Theodore Blackmon: Nice. That's creative.
NASA Moderator: Pernos says rocket boosters. John's suggestion, windshield wipers for the cameras.
Theodore Blackmon: There you go.
NASA Moderator: Matt says ftl communications. I've got it between questions here so I'm trying to jump around.
Theodore Blackmon: That's good.
NASA Moderator: Pernos also says the ability to gather samples and return to Earth.
Theodore Blackmon: Oh, yeah. Really looking at that one. It's difficult to blast off, and, you know, one of the things that you're going to enable a sample return mission is, you need to figure on you how to develop fuel on Mars. You know, you cants get off the surface of the planet. It would be too expensive to send the fuel to enable a rocket to come back, and so developing some mechanism by which you can actually get the sample back up into orbit and then have that vehicle return back here to Earth is an extremely challenging problem. One of the future technologies that will be tested on one of the upcoming Mars missions is fuel production on the planet, being able to take some of the elements in the atmosphere and then convert that into fuel so that then it would enable the ability to have a sample return mission. How about an airplane? Wouldn't it be nice to bring a glider into the planet?
NASA Moderator: Right. We actually have that suggestion here, a small plane that could fly around, take pictures, and then return to Pathfinder and relay those pictures to Earth. Okay, and Daniel, our in-house musician, says a disco blaring so we can show the aliens our best music.
Theodore Blackmon: (Laughing). I like it. You've got to have some culture, right?
NASA Moderator: Absolutely. Let's see. Pathfinder needs to use the DNA chips.
Theodore Blackmon: Ah! We've got a really smart bunch out there, huh? Great ideas.
NASA Moderator: Okay, I think that's it. Okay, yeah, I think that's about it here.
Theodore Blackmon: Super.
NASA Moderator: See if we get some more questions.
Christian asks, "What do you feel was the most -- I'm sorry -- yes, Christian -- "was the most valuable piece of information gained through the Pathfinder mission?"
Theodore Blackmon: Oh, that's a good one. The most valuable piece of information gained through the Pathfinder mission. I think the landing, the success of the landing. Let me hit upon a couple. One was, if you're familiar with the landing technique, it used air bags to land. And landing on a planet is so difficult for Mars and tends to be one of the most expensive elements of a mission. And so the fact that it worked was a really successful aspect.
I'll say, I'll put a whole 'nother twist on it as well. The overwhelming excitement and popularity of the mission I think was a real eye opener. Prior to the mission, you just had the sense that there wasn't -- you know, some of the -- I think some of the thoughts here within NASA was, "Well, the public's not so interested in exploring places like Mars." And there was an explosion of public interest during 1997. You know, the web site became one of the most popular web sites of all time. CNN and the public were just wanting to know more. And I think that exploring other planets is so fundamental to the nature of humans. You know, we are fundamentally explorers. We want to know more, and we want to go beyond what we know here on Earth. There's just so much additionally to know here on Earth. You know, don't get me wrong. There's -- there's so much to do here. But the whole thought of exploring other planets I think is just -- it's fascinating for the public, and I think one of the biggest things learned was how deeply interested the public is in exploring other planets.
NASA Moderator: Absolutely. And I guess a propos to that, Loren is asking, "How much access to the information found on Mars will the public eventually have?"
Theodore Blackmon: That's a really good question, too. And if you look at the way a mission is run, you know, some of these -- the mission being proposed by a team of scientists in terms of what they want to find, one of the things I found on the Pathfinder mission was, there was -- you know, we wanted to put some high-resolution images up onto the 3D models and get that out to the public, but there was some limit. Now, all of the images were actually posted. And that's exciting. I mean there was no hold-back of images, but the resolution of some of the images were lower than what the mission had. Although the mission finally released the full resolution of all the data.
And so typically during the mission, you know, the science teams that have dedicated their lives and some portion of their career, you know, you're talking about years at a time in order to have some instrument go on to Mars and collect data, they don't want everybody to immediately have access to the data that they have, because they're going to write their scientific results. And that's understandable. You know, they won those missions through a competitive process.
But the other hand, as you look at it from the public standpoint, I like to get the data out there and get it out to everyone in the highest resolution immediately and not worry about who gets published in what scientific journal.
I think these missions are funded by the public; they've got the right to the data.
Now, eventually NASA is very committed in terms of access of data and the access of the images and they don't cost anybody anything. You don't have to -- you know, you can go on on the NASA Mars Pathfinder web site and download spectacular 3D images. If you haven't done it, I'd really suggest doing it. You get a pair of red-blue glasses, you look at some of the anaglyphs, you put some filters on it, you put your 3D glasses on, and you can see some fantastic rocks in 3D and for the future missions I'm really excited about getting these virtual model ins full resolution out to the public with a software package that they can fly through Mars on, because you just -- it just gives you chills down your back to be involved in there. But NASA does get all of that doubt out to the public.
NASA Moderator: Terrific. Jacquelyn would like to know is there any work being done involving the application of artificial intelligence to robotic navigation systems?"
Theodore Blackmon: Yes. Absolutely. You could follow up with me at my e-mail address, which is on the last slide, and I can get you some links, here at NASA Ames, at JPL, and other research institutions across the nation, that's a very hot area, is how do you put more intelligence on board the rover to enable better navigation and various artificial intelligence techniques going from neural networks to fuzzy logic to sophisticated architectural systems involving various submodules, details about what specifically is being done for NASA robotic missions, which again, because of the -- all of the constraints of flight missions and operating on another planet in terms of the energy and the power and the weight restrictions, the computational restrictions, it's even a more challenging environment to enable higher degrees of autonomy than some of the robotic efforts here on Earth. A lot going on.
NASA Moderator: Okay, terrific. Daniel is asking a very pointed question here. [Little|It is], "You talked about how hard it was for roboticists to assemble the research on various subsystems. What are some of your thoughts by getting robot makers more efficient by getting them the info they need when they need it, I would assume he means. There [STHR*] any set idea out there that helps scientists share information efficiently? If the answer is the Internet, how so?"
Theodore Blackmon: Yeah, and I think that's a good question and, you know, I don't have the the exact answer, but I'll tell you, you know, just as somebody that's been involved in robots now for over a decade, the Internet is a valuable tool for accessing whatever information is out there. As you're working on sorm environment, you've got limited time, limited money, and limited budget and sometimes you feel like you're reinventing the wheel, that somebody has done the same thing. And for a lot of times that's fine. But just knowing what's out there, getting online and find out, do searches, eye kind of a search maniac. I found out so much about Mars and robots by just going on the Internet, you know, now I feel like I'm an expert. And I think ten, 20 years ago, that would have been very difficult to do. So I feel very fortunate to have the Internet.
I think there can be improvements. I think there are communities that are being formed, but I think there's a lot more that we can do to enable some level of standardization.
You know, one of the big difficulties -- the information access is out there, but the ability to go from reading something, knowing it exists, to being able to plug it and play it. And if you think about how computers have advanced so rapidly, a big part of electronics industry has always been standardized parts. And robotics is still in the area of being such a hobby. You know, I mean there are some spectacular one-offs like the Pathfinder rover, but it's really a one-off robot, you know, it's not as if you can just buy parts for the Pathfinder rover and plug it onto parts for something else. And I think developing that level of standardization across modules is a huge part of where we need to go as a community, being able to plug and play not only hardware, but also software modules so that you can leverage other activities and research going on.
Right now the amount of time to take something developed in one place and implement it into a whole new system almost equates to the time just to do it again. Until we get rid of that fact, we're going to be -- we've still got a long way to pave in terms of enabling better systems.
NASA Moderator: Okay. Appropriate to that, Lornian is suggesting a futuristic proposal, to produce power on a large scale, envisions placing giant solar modules in geostationary Earth orbit. The energy would be converted to microwaves and beamed to antennas on Earth for conversion to electrical power.
Theodore Blackmon: Hmm, wow.
NASA Moderator: Would this be feasible for Mars?
Theodore Blackmon: Hadn't thought about that. Certainly worth putting some thought into. There's some advanced concept groups in NASA that explore those type of sort of far-reaching visions that people have. You might want to look into that and see about throwing your ideas out there to some of them.
NASA Moderator: Excellent. I do think we have online an awful lot of the future roboticists and I'm going to close here with a question from Daniel that says, "What are the opportunities for a person with a Ph.D. after college in the field of robotics?"
Theodore Blackmon: Hmm. Well, you know, there's certainly quite a lot of opportunity, but there's some amount of commercial opportunity. There are commercial opportunities in terms of surgical robotics, robots that are going out and doing various activities in manufacturing, within other heavier industries. It seems that I think much of the opportunity tends to be within research institutions. Research institutions within the Navy, the Army, NASA, within various other organizations. And for somebody who's exploring a career in robotics, you're right on the cutting edge. I mean you're at something that's very early on. The broader proliferation of robotics into various commercial applications I don't think has been very heavily achieved yet.
NASA Moderator: Okay. Terrific. Well, we want to thank you, Dr. Blackmon, for joining us here today and give you go these insights, and thank you to all the students out there for your excellent questions.
Theodore Blackmon: Yeah, thank you.
NASA Moderator: We got some good feedback from them, I think.
Theodore Blackmon: Super. Yeah, I really enjoyed the feedback.
NASA Moderator: Okay, well, thank you very much, and we will see you again on Thursday, folks. Join us then for the robotics education project.
Theodore Blackmon: Thank you.
(End of broadcast.)