After more than a year on Mars, NASA's rover Curiosity is taking the reins through the use of its autonomous navigation system, allowing it to decide for itself how to best navigate the Red Planet's rocky terrain.
Called autonav, the technology allows Curiosity to analyze the images it takes to calculate a safe driving path. As a result, the rover is able to proceed safely beyond the area that human drivers working from Earth can evaluate ahead of time.
"Curiosity takes several sets of stereo pairs of images, and the rover's computer processes that information to map any geometric hazard or rough terrain," said Mark Maimone, rover mobility engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The rover considers all the paths it could take to get to the designated endpoint for the drive and chooses the best one."
The software was adapted from a similar capability used by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, also currently active on Mars.
Using autonav, the rover successfully drove onto ground that could not be confirmed safe before the start of the drive. The route included approximately 33 feet of autonomous navigation across hidden ground as part of a day's total drive of over 140 feet.
"We could see the area before the dip, and we told the rover where to drive on that part. We could see the ground on the other side, where we designated a point for the rover to end the drive, but Curiosity figured out for herself how to drive the uncharted part in between," said JPL's John Wright, a rover driver.
Curiosity is nearly two months into its multi-month trek where it worked for the first half of 2013 to the lower layers of a 3-mile-tall mound called Mount Sharp, the mission's major destination.