Re:Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
by whuffman on Thursday February 18, 2021 @05:42PM
(#26186836)
Just as a heads up, the HazCams on Perseverance are in fact in color (Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9 - "The Mars 2020 Navcams and Hazcams offer three primary improvements over MER and MSL. The first improvement is an upgrade to a detector with 3-channel, red/green/blue (RGB) color capability that will enable better contextual imaging capabilities than the previous engineering cameras, which only had a black/white capability.") Your observations are correct though - the stereo precision is important, so there was additional analysis of the stereo depth computation to make sure it wouldn't cause an issue.
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Re:Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
by nwallin on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:32AM
(#26190372)
Huh, I guess so. Looking over the study it looks like they had issues by looking at dirt in scoops and being unable to tell whether it's Martian dirt or a shadow.
I have a feeling I'd be the angry guy in the meeting who wouldn't accept the consensus. "but what about latency! what about the descend and landing!" shakes fist
Re:Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]
by rmonroe on Friday February 19, 2021 @02:18AM
(#26190558)
Nah, your concerns are 100% reasonable - they just operate on a different context. On Earth, latency is king. On Mars, especially until the Primary Mission is complete, it's all about risk mitigation. Since we're light-minutes away from Earth, a few frames of latency is nothing. At the same time, you want to avoid breaking your $3B machine, which is hard to operate given the time-of-light delay and comms limitations. Just a different set of tradeoffs. IIRC they first tested on-device deep learning for hazard avoidance in Curiosity, but don't quote me on that.
-Worked at JPL for a few years and have dozens of friends, a few in the vision system.