Fully autonomous driving will take a years to become commonplace on Earth, but the Perseverance rover is already doing it on Mars.
Called AutoNav, the autonomous system makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, finds hazards and plans a route around obstacles without additional direction from humans on Earth.
“The rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning,” said Vandi Verma, senior engineer and rover planner and driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The capability is called “thinking while driving,” she said in a NASA update.
Using that capability, Perseverance can move at up to 393 feet per hour-- up to five times faster than the Curiosity rover on Mars, which used an earlier version of AutoNav.
Using AutoNav means that Perseverance can get to places where scientists want to go much faster instead of having to drive around complex terrains filled with boulders and other hazards.
Humans still get involved in the navigation process, however. A navigation route is planned ahead of time by teams that use satellite images of the Martian surface. They sometimes wear 3D glass to view the surface to find greater details. They plan the route, then send it to Mars a day in advance. Driving in real-time is impossible because it takes more than 10 minutes for a signal to reach Mars at a distance of 227 million miles from Earth.
Perseverance uses a special computer for surface navigation called Vision Compute Element which was also used to guide Perseverance to the surface during descent in February. Keeping track of how far the rover has moved is done through visual odometry, which means Perseverance captures images as it moves, comparing one position to the next to see if it has moved the expected distance.
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The rover’s main science mission is to collect rock and dust samples from the surface for later analysis once a future mission brings the samples back to Earth. Scientists picked Jezero Crater where Pioneer is operating to find samples that could indicate ancient microbial life on Mars.