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NASA considers manned outpost around moon to control robots on lunar surface
- jws 15y agoDriving remote controlled robots on the dark side is the excuse for storing people at the L2 point opposite the moon. How about we just put a repeater at L4 and L2 and leave the humans home? Or three repeaters in lunar orbit if we don't want to clutter up L4 and L2.
- rlpb 15y agoWhat would that do to latency?
- maaku 15y agoOn the order of seconds, which is really not a problem (I work at NASA and we've tested remote vehicle operation in analogue environments with 3+ second RTT. The operators adjust to it pretty fast).
- rbanffy 15y agoIf I remember correctly, you can put the repeater on orbit around L2 and have it visible from Earth(it would look like it's circling the Moon). Latency may prove a bitch. But first problems first - shouldn't we put a couple rovers on the near side of the Moon first to develop the technology before we think about (and spend money on) putting them on the other side and invent a couple other problems we really don't have yet (and may never actually have)? Just imagine rovers get brainy enough to be completely autonomous (something I classify as highly likely) - why would we need to have a couple humans on L2 to remote control them? "Because it's cool" doesn't cut it.
- melling 15y agoWouldn't it be cheaper and better to develop the robots to be autonomous?
- m3koval 15y agoNothing is cheap about autonomy, especially when there is limited computing power on-board the robot and power consumption is a major constraint. Using a hybrid remote operated/autonomous approach is reasonable, though: only send high level commands to the robot. These commands require less bandwidth and are less impacted by latency, so it's the best of both worlds. I believe NASA already does something like this on the Mars rovers by allowing the operator to specify waypoints and letting the robot plan their own paths between the waypoints.