From a Field in Massachusetts to the Plains of Mars

摘要

Space nerds love to gush about the mighty Curiosity, NASA's one-ton rover currently rolling around Mars, drilling into rocks, and taking selfies. But last September, in a Massachusetts field, a long-necked robot built by students at West Virginia University in Morgantown did Curiosity one better: Working autonomously-that is, without direction from human controllers--the robot made decisions about where to search for various objects, located them (even ones it had never seen before), scooped them up with an ingenious shovel-and-basket device, and gently and precisely deposited them at a home base. Named Cataglyphis, after the desert ant whose navigation strategy it mimics, the robot was required to perform its tasks without using Earth-based navigation systems like GPS or magnetic compasses. (It used lidar and inertial systems.) Its success at the two-hour trial at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts won $750,000 for WVU and its Interactive Robotics Laboratory in the fifth year of NASA's Sample Return Robot Challenge.