MSU professor working on ‘brain’ for NASA planetary rovers
June 6, 2003
A Mississippi State professor is among U.S. scientists helping NASA develop a new generation of roving robots that can “think” their way out of tight spots and secure valuable data while exploring the far reaches of outer space.
“It’s a high-level project to build software that will help these robots make decisions,” said Eric Hansen, an assistant professor of computer science at the university. “I’m working on the brain, so to speak. It’s an application of artificial intelligence.”
Call them robotic explorers or planetary rovers, the remote-controlled landers have been sent into space aboard unmanned flights for more than four decades to probe for signs of life or extinct life on Mars and other planets. They transmit data about samples of rock, soil or atmosphere back to Earth as they ramble, scoop and dig.
Hansen said similar rovers also have been used to navigate the treacherous insides of volcanoes, murky ocean depths and even the carnage of the World Trade Center towers following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Robots are used to go places where humans cannot go,” he said.
A British-built, $60 million Beagle 2 lander was aboard a European Space Agency craft that blasted off June 2 atop a Russian rocket bound for Mars. Later this month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will send its own twin rovers—both about the size of a desk—to the Red Planet on a separate $800 million expedition.
Armed with panoramic cameras and other sensitive equipment, the rovers will land on the planet’s surface with a series of bounces, safely cushioned inside an inflatable cocoon.
“NASA has a program to send up a series of rovers during this decade and wants each mission to be more sophisticated than the previous one,” said Hansen, who holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University and master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts.
A Falmouth, Mass., native who joined the MSU faculty in 1998, Hansen is the only Mississippi member of a team that includes researchers from UMass and the NASA-Ames Research Center at Sunnyvale, Calif. Headed by UMass professor Shlomo Zilberstein, the team is using a nearly $1 million NASA grant to develop computer software that could allow rovers to act more independently of Earth controls in their celestial pursuits.
Working with computer simulations of the expensive, highly customized rovers, the team is one of about a half-dozen research groups across the nation developing theoretical software models that could be used by NASA missions later this decade. Hansen’s team is two years into a three-year project, but hopes to obtain more federal money to continue its research work.
“Because of the distance between Earth and Mars (about 35 million miles at the closest point), the communication between the space agency and the rovers now occurs on almost a daily basis,” said Hansen. “It takes at least 20 minutes just to get the electrical signal transmitted one way.
“If the rover runs into an unexpected obstacle, it will just stop and send its signal back to NASA,” he added. “The agency then will re-calculate a new plan and send it back. In the meantime, the rover just sits there and waits. It can’t think for itself.”
In the project with which he is involved, NASA “would like for the rover to be more intelligent, more autonomous, so it can make decisions of its own,” Hansen continued. “If it runs into an obstacle, it can re-calculate its plan and move around the obstacle. Or, if it notices an interesting rock on the way, it can stop and take a picture or use its scientific instruments to obtain information.”
As Hansen explained, the on-site re-calculations would force the rovers to consider such logistical problems as diminishing battery power, time pressures and limited amount of band width for data transmissions back to Earth.
Although NASA seeks a reliable and practical computer model that would serve as the “brain” of future rovers by the end of the decade, Hansen said the space agency insists on a thorough testing regimen to ensure safety and overall mission success.
“They don’t want the rover to be so adventurous that it might fall off a cliff or something,” he said.
Hansen, whose department is a part of the Bagley College of Engineering, said his team also is working on a longer-range NASA objective to develop theoretical models that would allow multiple rovers to cooperate on a single task.
“Eventually, they want rovers up there that can work together for use in building a space station or something like that,” he said. “It’s a very interesting project, but it’s hard to explain the theoretical stuff.
“I just tell my 10-year-old niece I’m working on robots for Mars. That goes a long way.”