Stanford Seminar - Autonomous NASA robots breaking records on Mars

March 17, 2023 Vandi Verma of NASA (JPL) The goal of NASA’s robotics missions is to maximize science return. As instructions can only be sent once every one or more Martian solar days, robots need to be autonomous to be effective. In this seminar I’ll discuss autonomous navigation, flight, sampling and targeting data from the Mars 2020 mission which consists of the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter. The goal of the mission is to core and store Martian samples for eventual return to Earth. Perseverance’s manipulation and sampling systems have collected samples from unique locations at twice the rate of any prior mission and broken several planetary rover driving records. 88% of all driving has been autonomous - an order of magnitude more than any prior NASA Mars rover. Perseverance can autonomously select scientifically interesting rocks to shoot with its laser for analysis and is in the process of deploying autonomous planning and scheduling of activities. I’ll discuss some open problems that if addressed could further enhance space robotics at NASA JPL. #nasa #autonomousrobot 0:00 Introduction 0:25 ARTISTS CONCEPTS 1:47 PROJECTS 2:08 MARS 2020 ROBOTICS 3:39 SUCCESSFUL INITIAL MARS SURFACE MISSION 5:57 JEZERO CRATER 6:26 AUTONOMOUS HAZARD AVOIDANCE 10:09 CUMULATIVE ODOMETRY BY DRIVE MODE 11:45 TARGETED MOBILITY IMPROVEMENT 14:44 NAVIGATION AND STATE ESTIMATION 16:39 SUPERVISION 18:25 ROBOTIC OPERATIONS SPACECRAFT COMMANDS 21:10 MULTIPLE SOL DRIVE 21:48 OPPORTUNISTIC EXTENSION DRIVE 23:21 INGENUITY HELICOPTER 25:25 INGENUITY WINTERING 31:21 CORING 31:30 PROADAPT DRILLING AND ABRADING 33:37 SEEDING PROADAPT 34:52 SAMPLE CORES COLLECTED 35:16 MARS SAMPLE RETURN PLANNING 36:51 SAMPLE DEPOT 37:58 DELTA TOP 39:03 HELICOPTER BASE STATION 40:06 DRIVE FAULTS 40:42 GLOBAL LOCALIZATION 41:27 CHALLENGES: MAP VS. IMAGE APPEARANCE 41:52 CHALLENGES: OCCLUSIONS 42:30 PATH PLANNING