The Robot Blimps of Mars

Wired has me eager for interplanetary conquest with their look at our armada of airships and robotic rovers:

With the miniature lab tests complete, [Wolfgang Fink, of Cal Tech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory,] plans to take his show on the road, probably to the Arizona desert. Over a large geographic region, they’ll float an airship with on-board camera and release rovers controlled by the feature analyzer software.

“For initial test purposes, we could put a Coke can and see if the science algorithms will flag these anomalies,” Fink said, “And then, once they are flagged, generate the navigation commands that are issued from the airships to the ground.”

They plan to try the Coke can test in the next year.

Tags: space exploration