Re:Mars Helicopter Lands Safely After Serious In-Flight Anomaly
by serf on Friday May 28, 2021 @04:27AM
(#27313000)
>And where, pray tell, would you find battle tested libraries for flying a drone on Mars?
this isn't magic. Image processing isn't a wholly unknown field when under the influence of Martian gravity.
It's a staggering achievement, and a testament to humankind's ability to wrangle technology, but -- to be frank here -- visual odometry is technology from 1960s era spy planes, not beyond-human voodoo.
Sometimes errors are stupid ones, even if the stupidity is causing problems a zillion miles away on distant unknown frontiers being first-explored by human kind.
tl;dr : This visual odometry problem isn't a space problem, it's a computer science problem -- one that has been encountered by numerous people even here on earth.
The repercussions of such a simple non-space-problem might very well turn into space problems when the craft crashes, however -- and that's a damn shame given that this particular set of problems has been encountered-and-fixed by numerous earthlings over and over again.
super tl;dr : as an only half-informed-participant in this discussion I bet this problem is NIH-syndrome-related, a problem NASA has encountered a lot in the past, a problem that's entirely managerial and very hard to eradicate.
this isn't magic. Image processing isn't a wholly unknown field when under the influence of Martian gravity.
It's a staggering achievement, and a testament to humankind's ability to wrangle technology, but -- to be frank here -- visual odometry is technology from 1960s era spy planes, not beyond-human voodoo.
Sometimes errors are stupid ones, even if the stupidity is causing problems a zillion miles away on distant unknown frontiers being first-explored by human kind.
tl;dr : This visual odometry problem isn't a space problem, it's a computer science problem -- one that has been encountered by numerous people even here on earth.
The repercussions of such a simple non-space-problem might very well turn into space problems when the craft crashes, however -- and that's a damn shame given that this particular set of problems has been encountered-and-fixed by numerous earthlings over and over again.
super tl;dr : as an only half-informed-participant in this discussion I bet this problem is NIH-syndrome-related, a problem NASA has encountered a lot in the past, a problem that's entirely managerial and very hard to eradicate.