Terry Fong, Group Leader, Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG),

Saturday, December 01 2007

NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

The NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) is dedicated to enabling humans and robots to explore and learn about extreme environments, remote locations, and uncharted worlds. IRG conducts applied research in a wide range of areas with an emphasis on robotics systems science and field testing. IRG expertise includes applied computer vision, human-robot interaction, mobile manipulation, interactive 3D visualization, and robot software architecture. Terry Fong is the Group Lead for the IRG.

NASA Tech Briefs: What are some of the projects the IRG is working on now?

Terry Fong: We are working on a broad range of things with the common theme of trying to better support exploration. In particular, a primary focus of our work right now is supporting exploration at specific lunar sites. As an example, this summer we conducted a field test in Haughton Crater in Canada where we used two robots to do systematic site surveys. This is very different from the kinds of operations you’ve seen with the Mars Exploration Rovers in that we are interested in learning as much as possible about a bounded area.

During the two-and-a-half weeks we were operating up at Haughton, our two robots drove 45 kilometers, which is three times the distance that the Mars rovers have traveled in the past three years. We’re trying to characterize a bounded area or specific site, which means you need to cover it very densely and you need to do it systematically. We do terrain and sub-surface mapping, which requires driving a lot in an area. That percolates throughout the whole system in terms of how you deal with commanding the robots, what you use for visualizing what they’ve done, monitoring their state, the onboard autonomy, all kinds of things. There’s a fundamental difference from past NASA planetary robotics work.

NTB: The IRG has its own research facility that includes a Marscape outdoor rover test facility and a Moonscape indoor rover test facility. Why did you have to go to Canada to conduct these tests? What is it about that site that made it so desirable for the type of testing you were doing?

Fong: We do field tests all over the United States and in this case, Canada, because each analog site has a different value. There’s no way you can have a perfect reproduction of the Moon, except by going to the Moon. So, depending on what you’re testing, you would need to go test at different places.

It’s true we have an outdoor test site here which measures for the Marscape, but in reality, it’s pretty small. For example, “Drill Hill,” which is one of the analog lunar sites we mapped at Haughton Crater, measures 700 x 700 meters. There’s just no way to have anything of that scale at a NASA site, especially if you care about other properties such as it’s non-vegetative, that it has the same surface composition in terms of rocks and minerals as the Moon, or at least similar through the physical characteristics such as grain size, lighting, and other kinds of things. There are all kinds of different characteristic that you care about duplicating if you’re trying to test something. You just cannot do it all in a laboratory.

NTB: How do you locate these different sites around the country that are going to provide the type of results that are parallel to what you expect to find on other planets?

Fong: It depends on what you’re trying to do. If you go back to the Apollo program, they actually took astronauts to many different sites in the Southwest desert region of the United States, and also to Hawaii, because they were interested in doing field geology. They were looking at areas that had similar basalts - things that were very similar to what they expected the astronauts to find on the Moon.