6 ms·

An even cooler project would be proving once and for all that a swarm of small, rugged drones can indeed cover a larger area in harsh conditions and are a much

An even cooler project would be proving once and for all that a swarm of small, rugged drones can indeed cover a larger area in harsh conditions and are a much more sensible strategy in exploration than a large single drone. Iff you have ten, twenty expendable machines then you don't need the same level of QA, thus opening up a lot of interesting possibilities. If we can get equivalent amounts of exploration done in just half (or maybe quarter) the cost then it opens up room for an arms race of sorts where each generation can be rapidly iterated upon and we can plan such missions within a one or two year timeframe instead of an eight year one. Of course, this is easier said than done... ;)

deeringc 14y ago
Well, surely for a certain type of scientific mission (e.g. something like spectral analysis via ChemCam) you cannot just shrink down the components and instruments indefinitely. The size of Curiosity is directly related to the fact that it is bristling with scientific instruments like no other probe before it. Sure you could make a swarm of toaster sized drones that just go off and cover ground, but the purpose of this mission is not just to take some pictures but to do some very detailed scientific analysis.
- todayiamme 14y ago
  What you could do is have dedicated drones which are essentially movable instruments, so you can have co-operation on tasks and say teams of 3 or 4 (one vaporises, the other has the spectrometer. One drills, the other has the reagents and so on) If you enter this paradigm then you can eliminate costs such as that long arm which you need to position the instrument package. That arm in of itself is an engineering marvel and it requires a lot of careful design to make sure that it doesn't malfunction. (remember you have a not so light weight at the end, the torque due to that is huge and you have a complex assembly consisting linkages to transfer torque and so on...) The idea of this is to see how simple and redundant you can make things. If for the cost of that arm we could have one small team of rovers wouldn't it be worth it? Wouldn't it jump start exploration?
  - deeringc 14y ago
    What you might "gain" in reduced complexity by getting rid of the arm you loose massively in being able to power the whole system efficiently in one go. If you split the 10.6 pounds of plutonium across N smaller drones you would need to duplicate N Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTPs), power electronics, batteries, radios, cameras, computers and probably a half a dozen other things I haven't thought of yet. This probe is going to be going for at very least 10 years - probably quite a lot longer, all because of the design choices around how it's powered.
    - todayiamme 14y ago
      Again do we need all of those systems? Why can't you have two dedicated machines for earth communication and the rest communicate via a HF radio protocol? You don't need a RTG if it's say sojourner size and packs one payload on a standardised mobile base, solar panels will work just fine. Since you have redundancy built into the swarm you can skimp on a lot of things including computing power. Remember you can use group decision making for more complex "choices" and if you lose a few drones due to unforeseen obstacles, then objectively it shouldn't matter, so you don't need a lot of LIDAR and stuff as well. As far as heating and shielding goes then the smaller size actually works to your advantage. I don't see any reason why someone shouldn't make this. Yes these probes will be disposable, but that's the entire point. They can be used and thrown away opening doors to risk taking that we haven't really seen before.
      - deeringc 14y ago
        > Again do we need all of those systems? Yes. Like I've said above the explicit purpose of this mission is to gather advanced scientific data which requires comparatively bulky instruments and high power availability. Because it is so ridiculously expensive to get anything to Mars you want it to last as long as possible. "Disposable drones" make absolutely no sense when it costs so much to launch them into orbit, transport them 60 million km across the solar system, and then enter the Martian atmosphere and land in a coordinated place on the surface. Each gram you get to that point costs many thousand dollars. You don't just plan your strategy around losing a bunch of them - that would be many hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain. Using a decaying nuclear isotope to power your probe you will get many multiples more bang for buck compared to solar powered probes which so far have maxed out at about 5 years. The solar concentration of a Martian winter is extremely low, and this problem is exasperated the smaller the probe and the resulting battery that it can carry. Just like in computing and electronics, physical and mechanical distributed systems are inherently complex - more so than monolithic systems.
buq2 14y ago
There is at least MetNet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetNet) which aims to swarm of measurement devices on Mars surface. They are going to use immobile measurement platforms.

deeringc 14y ago

Well, surely for a certain type of scientific mission (e.g. something like spectral analysis via ChemCam) you cannot just shrink down the components and instruments indefinitely. The size of Curiosity is directly related to the fact that it is bristling with scientific instruments like no other probe before it. Sure you could make a swarm of toaster sized drones that just go off and cover ground, but the purpose of this mission is not just to take some pictures but to do some very detailed scientific analysis.

todayiamme 14y ago
What you could do is have dedicated drones which are essentially movable instruments, so you can have co-operation on tasks and say teams of 3 or 4 (one vaporises, the other has the spectrometer. One drills, the other has the reagents and so on) If you enter this paradigm then you can eliminate costs such as that long arm which you need to position the instrument package. That arm in of itself is an engineering marvel and it requires a lot of careful design to make sure that it doesn't malfunction. (remember you have a not so light weight at the end, the torque due to that is huge and you have a complex assembly consisting linkages to transfer torque and so on...) The idea of this is to see how simple and redundant you can make things. If for the cost of that arm we could have one small team of rovers wouldn't it be worth it? Wouldn't it jump start exploration?
- deeringc 14y ago
  What you might "gain" in reduced complexity by getting rid of the arm you loose massively in being able to power the whole system efficiently in one go. If you split the 10.6 pounds of plutonium across N smaller drones you would need to duplicate N Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTPs), power electronics, batteries, radios, cameras, computers and probably a half a dozen other things I haven't thought of yet. This probe is going to be going for at very least 10 years - probably quite a lot longer, all because of the design choices around how it's powered.
  - todayiamme 14y ago
    Again do we need all of those systems? Why can't you have two dedicated machines for earth communication and the rest communicate via a HF radio protocol? You don't need a RTG if it's say sojourner size and packs one payload on a standardised mobile base, solar panels will work just fine. Since you have redundancy built into the swarm you can skimp on a lot of things including computing power. Remember you can use group decision making for more complex "choices" and if you lose a few drones due to unforeseen obstacles, then objectively it shouldn't matter, so you don't need a lot of LIDAR and stuff as well. As far as heating and shielding goes then the smaller size actually works to your advantage. I don't see any reason why someone shouldn't make this. Yes these probes will be disposable, but that's the entire point. They can be used and thrown away opening doors to risk taking that we haven't really seen before.
    - deeringc 14y ago
      > Again do we need all of those systems? Yes. Like I've said above the explicit purpose of this mission is to gather advanced scientific data which requires comparatively bulky instruments and high power availability. Because it is so ridiculously expensive to get anything to Mars you want it to last as long as possible. "Disposable drones" make absolutely no sense when it costs so much to launch them into orbit, transport them 60 million km across the solar system, and then enter the Martian atmosphere and land in a coordinated place on the surface. Each gram you get to that point costs many thousand dollars. You don't just plan your strategy around losing a bunch of them - that would be many hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain. Using a decaying nuclear isotope to power your probe you will get many multiples more bang for buck compared to solar powered probes which so far have maxed out at about 5 years. The solar concentration of a Martian winter is extremely low, and this problem is exasperated the smaller the probe and the resulting battery that it can carry. Just like in computing and electronics, physical and mechanical distributed systems are inherently complex - more so than monolithic systems.

buq2 14y ago

There is at least MetNet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetNet) which aims to swarm of measurement devices on Mars surface. They are going to use immobile measurement platforms.