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And where, pray tell, would you find battle tested libraries for flying a drone on Mars? I'm also reasonably certain that the drone isn't running Android, and

And where, pray tell, would you find battle tested libraries for flying a drone on Mars? I'm also reasonably certain that the drone isn't running Android, and that not doing so is the correct design choice.

rurounijones 5y ago
To be Devil's advocate. OP was talking about a VGA camera API only and what an example of a battle-tested camera library already does. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting the thing should run android. But if you are writing something yourself then looking at what existing libraries already (and more importantly their test suites!) do is a good idea. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't in this case, hard to know with the data available.
fjdncncndb 5y ago
I would imagine you could reuse code from a flying drone on Earth.
- gscott 5y ago
  Next time they need to send up gps sats to orbit Mars...
  - serf 5y ago
    visual odometry is a fairly common feature for earth-creations (even toy drones) operating in GPS-denied environments. We have plenty of faux-mars environments to practice these techniques on. NASA even has their own. many of the toy indoor-use drones use such techniques for attitude/altitude-hold features when under a roof.
- ghhhhhk8899jj 5y ago
  There's no reason to assume that code would contain fewer bugs.
serf 5y ago
>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.
- numpad0 5y ago
  Re:tl;dr: Snapdragon camera peripheral is probably not super often used on Earth to fly a drone
perryizgr8 5y ago
According to Wikipedia: The helicopter uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with a Linux operating system. Considering Qualcomm never releases their kernel sources, I am really worried that NASA might have been forced to use a modified Android system.
- ludocode 5y ago
  I mean they weren't "forced" to use anything. They chose the chip. If they had different requirements they could have chosen a different chip. Most likely they just used the specific kernel version with closed binary blobs from Qualcomm for a typical embedded Linux, not the full Android system.

rurounijones 5y ago

To be Devil's advocate. OP was talking about a VGA camera API only and what an example of a battle-tested camera library already does. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting the thing should run android. But if you are writing something yourself then looking at what existing libraries already (and more importantly their test suites!) do is a good idea. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't in this case, hard to know with the data available.

fjdncncndb 5y ago

I would imagine you could reuse code from a flying drone on Earth.

gscott 5y ago
Next time they need to send up gps sats to orbit Mars...
- serf 5y ago
  visual odometry is a fairly common feature for earth-creations (even toy drones) operating in GPS-denied environments. We have plenty of faux-mars environments to practice these techniques on. NASA even has their own. many of the toy indoor-use drones use such techniques for attitude/altitude-hold features when under a roof.
ghhhhhk8899jj 5y ago
There's no reason to assume that code would contain fewer bugs.

serf 5y ago

>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.

numpad0 5y ago
Re:tl;dr: Snapdragon camera peripheral is probably not super often used on Earth to fly a drone

perryizgr8 5y ago

According to Wikipedia: The helicopter uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with a Linux operating system. Considering Qualcomm never releases their kernel sources, I am really worried that NASA might have been forced to use a modified Android system.

ludocode 5y ago
I mean they weren't "forced" to use anything. They chose the chip. If they had different requirements they could have chosen a different chip. Most likely they just used the specific kernel version with closed binary blobs from Qualcomm for a typical embedded Linux, not the full Android system.