NASA's Perseverance rover set driving records on Mars, and it didn't need human drivers. The rover's AutoNav system takes a lot of the credit.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been exploring Mars for more than 900 sols. It’s the most scientifically advanced rover ever built and has opened our eyes wider to Mars and the possibility that it hosted life. The rover’s crowning achievement is preparing samples for eventual return to Earth, an important next step in understanding Mars.
Planning the route is a detailed activity based on satellite images of the rover’s region of operation, the floor of Jezero Crater. Once operators choose the destination, it’s up to AutoNav to find the best route between obstacles, including boulders and steep, unstable slopes. And AutoNav is proving it’s up to the task.“We sped up AutoNav by four or five times,” said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPL’s team of rover planners.
“Everybody on the team knows we only got to this level of performance by standing on the shoulders of giants. Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity were the trailblazers.”Perseverance is the first Mars rover to drive the first 50% of its distance autonomously, a feat it accomplished early in its mission after 210 sols. The rover’s flexibility and multiple operating modes, especially AutoNav, helped the rover achieve this record. Its success continues.
“It was much denser than anything Perseverance has encountered before – just absolutely littered with these big rocks,” said Del Sesto, deputy rover planner lead for Perseverance at JPL in Southern California. “We didn’t want to go around it because it would have taken us weeks. More time driving means less time for science, so we just dove right in.”
“If you take out the sols dedicated to mission science, the traverse through Snowdrift Peak only took six autonomous drive sols, which is probably 12 sols faster than Curiosity would have taken,” said Del Sesto. “Of course, everybody on the team knows we only got to this level of performance by standing on the shoulders of giants. Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity were the trailblazers.
There’s a critical difference between Perseverance’s AutoNav and the autonomous systems of its predecessors. Perseverance’s system can process information as it drives. It can take new images and process them as it moves around on the surface, thanks to faster cameras and more powerful computers. In fact, Perseverance has two computers in its navigation system, and its extra one is totally dedicated to image processing.
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