Tess had spent a few days at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to
explore a few of the labs workshops and testing environments used in the
development of space exploration technology one type of technology we
definitely needed to check out where the robots we found one of the robots at the
rover scape a large fenced off area filled with rocks craters and small
Hills used to simulate the terrain of surfaces like the Moon or Mars
these aren't autonomous robots but their pilots may be astronauts remotely
controlling them from space in 2013 three astronauts aboard the
International Space Station tested out remotely operating a rover on this very
rover scape from orbit the intelligent robotics group brought out one of the
rover testing platforms for us to check out and I was pretty psyched to take it
out for a test drive
hi good to see you good to see you so where are we right now so we are in
one of our testing facility from the robotics group at NASA Ames Research
Center we call it the rover scape because a lot of the tests that we are
doing our rover focus we are also testing some other robots such as UAVs
and then some like fancy robot that we've developed in-house so it sounds
like there are two things we're talk about one like the the terrain and what
the objectives are designing this escape this landscape and also this robot
itself is this supposed to represent just could be versatile any different
type of environment not necessarily the Moon or Mars yeah so it hasn't a
specific focus we definitely use it for any terrain so for us usually the art
project on Mars or moon focus but sometimes you also focus on some moon of
Jupiter or Saturn there's different kind of environments with more or less
fidelity that we go analog that would represent what we think we would find on
the Moon or Mars how close or not we are to actually plastic rocks are not
exactly what you'd find exactly but the the cool thing is that the the robot has
some sensors and to some extent we can make those sensor believe
those are real and they're real enough for the robot at least so that's why we
usually start in this like as I said low fidelity environment to do some testing
and then afterwards we go to higher fidelity environments such as the
Atacama Desert one of our project or in the the Canadian Arctic and then there
this represent a high fidelity environment both for the robot and also
sometimes also for the scientists so what exactly can this rover do like what
is what are the capabilities of what we can see today so if you think of a rover
what it really is is a way to bring science to a specific point and it has
the advantage of being mobile so if you were to go on the moon you could either
land an aesthetic and then observe what is surrounding basically your landing
spots but if you want to explore further you need a mobile platform and this is
exactly what a rover is in our case we have four-wheel that are all driven and
all steered so the rover can go over multiple types of terrain uphill
downhill we usually limit to slope about like 20 degrees but in practice it can
go probably like 40 45 degree slope depending on the terrain and then we can
also go over obstacles so on top of those four driven wheels we have a
suspension mechanism that we call a differential mechanical linkage that
links the two rocker but allows them to rotate individually to keep all four
wheels in contact with the ground at all time and this means that if I'm going
over a rock that I can just demonstrate right now you'll see that all the four
points of contact contacts are gonna be on the ground while both rock we are
going to move independently from each other and so i enabled the robot you can
hear the click that is the magnetic motor and then I'm gonna drive forward
towards that rock and go with one wheel over it and you can see now you can see
those like two clear distinct angle in between the rockers and this is this
differential suspension mechanism working and so my understanding is this
platform isn't supposed to represent any one single type of robot or over that
NASA is working on but just the capabilities of kind of the
dress that a mobile laboratory would needed or then is correct so we are not
as you said like designing for a particular mission we are designing a
rover that can be used in multiple scenarios that can carry a certain
amount of science basically in our case our payload is about 200 kilograms but
could be used on a lunar mission to do some testing or a Mars mission so it's
not specifically designed with one terrain in particular and how
challenging it is it to actually put together a prototype rover like this you
know if someone in home wanted to make their own prototype rover it was this
like a lot of work or is this something you can kind of like put together so the
very cool thing is that this is fairly challenging to put together because we
have a lot of constraints working like for NASA and working with like fairly
expensive equipments needed to be very robust when we go testing so very
reliable system but if you look at the overall system itself it's very simple
so it's a few motors in our case you know like very high like high quality
expensive motor is good you can have like a simple servo motors costing a few
thousands of dollar being your replacement for your driving motor and
then the whole chassis being 3d printed or like you know rapidly manufactured
and and then on top of this the control can be done you know unlike any
Raspberry Pi or you've been potentially a microcontroller so anybody in theory
could like put their own Rover together and it's you know working out quite like
a few things so probably a lot of time that you need to invest but it's not
that difficult overall in the robotics group where people usually up
engineering backgrounds like we're working kids who want to do what you do
in the future where can they get started where we recommend so the first thing is
I think is being really passionate advice ions and engineering in general
and that's like the one quality that we always look for and then obviously you
need to gain some technical knowledge so our group is really focused on usually
computer science and then some mechanical engineering so robotics needs
that you know a broad set of skills but eventually any technical person could
help us out and design or work on part of that system
thank you so much but of course the rover operators at NASA aren't gonna be
using commercial gamepads to control Rovers on the moon that's done with
custom-made Mission Control software and as we found out software that's being
developed at Ames and it's an open-source framework we visited the
lunar planning lab to see how open MCT can be used to simulate the planning and
operations of a future rover mission okay so what we're looking at here is
driving software so this is software that we use kind of both in testing here
at Ames Research Center we might be seen as you came in there's a rover yard
where we where we test we test this with kind of real hardware we also use it for
running simulations so simulating kind of potential future lunar rover missions
the so the role of the driver who's using the software is basically to kind
of navigate around using white points on the surface of the Moon and kind of
avoiding obstacles along the way try not to drive into craters and those kinds of
things so you're going to show us how to drive on the moon yeah sure and so the
the way that we kind of drive a rover on the moon is the first thing to do is
look around the rover make an assessment of kind of where where is safe to drive
so looking here I've got some kind of pink spots and some kind of blank areas
here where I don't have good data but over here I I can see that there's some
nice kind of green safe terrain for me to drive on so the first thing I'm going
to do is turn the rover to the right
and then command it to drive and you're going to see a delight while that
happens and that delay is a simulation of the communications delay when you're
operating a rover on the moon so takes a couple of seconds just the light to get
to the moon and then you have some like kind of network delays and other things
it's a very iterative process where you go step by step by step
acquiring you data with each step is there a general best practice is that
how many steps you want to operate and what not to tax in overload so that's
something that we're actively trying to figure out right now that's why we have
these simulations what we're simulating as much as anything is the what we call
the concept of operation so we're kind of trying to figure out the best mode of
operating arosa like this operating a rover on the
moon is quite different cooperating or rover on Mars on Mars you have much
longer kind of Lightspeed delays so our delays of a few seconds probably seems
quite kind of I'm sure the MSL operators would would be with very happy to have
that problem so in our case we can have a much shorter decision cycle but yeah
in terms of how far we drive with each with each kind of Waypoint that that's
something that we're figuring on how much ground we can cover in a in a shift
is these are these are all questions that we're trying to answer right now I
know this looks slow methodical but it's actually quite thrilling it's nothing
it's like you don't want to screw it up I can only imagine a real operator I'll
be a robot you know off earth how how how nervous
that make me yeah exactly and this this is just a simulation as you say that
it's the simulation is intended to be as kind of realistic as possible so these
images that are coming out of our simulator in terms of kind of the
lighting environment and so and it's intended to be as realistic as possible
so that we can put our candidate drivers in as realistic a scenario as possible
much yeah no worries
that's one big hangar yeah Oh what is this so this is hangar 1 I believe it's
the largest hangar ever I think hangar 1 used to hold big airships for
the navies and it was built in the 1930s this used to have a skin all over it
back when I worked at NASA Ames years ago and they took it down I think
because of the bestest or other toxic materials that they had to take out of
it so now it's a skeleton but it's actually kind of hardcore and awesome as
a skeleton I think how long was it when did it stop being in use when they took
the skin off or I'm actually not sure you know I think years ago they used to
I know that they had parties actually in hangar 1 many years ago when it still
had its skin on it and then when they started taking all the skin off that
took many several years and then it kind of got decommissioned during that that's
incredible 1930s thing is you know getting close to a hundred years old and
even looks like the architecture of it it's kind of it's time it's really
really neat and of course in front of it you got a little fleet of jets NASA's
FeliCa this is there's an airfield here right yeah this is the Moffett airfield
and I just love that all the jets and everything because they've got the old
NASA logos which of course I prefer personally