Interview | |||
Q 1: | How were you chosen to be the Rover driver? |
||
A 1: ![]() |
I've been here (at JPL) now 13 years, and leading up to Pathfinder, I've
been working in the robotic vehicles group where we do research on robots with
the intention of learning both hardware and software issues related to
eventually going to another planet.
So for years, my role has been creating user interfaces and the control station software and being the primary test operator or driver for those vehicles. And we've gone through a number of iterations. We've had five or six different robots of various sizes, some as large as a Volkswagen bus, and almost always we would test them out in the Arroyo Seco area. We have a dry river that runs right by the lab, and our research lab is situated there on purpose, so we can easily transport these vehicles there and do testing. It's worked out really well, and we've learned a lot. I first got here in 1985. We were working with very ancient hardware by today's standards. All the vehicles have been wheeled vehicles, as opposed to walking robots that other people have done research on. and they've all had six wheels. We found that's a good compromise in mobility versus complexity. And one of the primary capabilities has been that they've all had cameras on them that function as the primary sensors to control the vehicles. And we use typically two video cameras in stereo, so that they provide similar capability to the human eye, right and left, and we send those signals back, and we present them to an operator, which has been typically myself, in a fashion that allows us to see it in 3D. We present to one eye the input from one camera and the other eye input from the other camera. We can then sense depth. It's almost like we're sitting right on the rover, from a Lander viewpoint. | ||
|