Clarach Bay in Wales acted as a challenging stand-in for Mars in July as a team from SciSys put the Indie rover development platform through its paces. The team were at Clarach as part of their involvement in the European Commission Framework 7 Provisg and Proviscout projects which are seeking to demonstrate a range of advanced computer vision and autonomy capabilities for future Mars Rovers. Sun cream and umbrellas were the order of the day as the team dodged the variable weather to test Indie in a series of scenarios specified by planetary geologists from the University of Leicester. This was Indie's first deployment in an outdoor environment and the event was used to test the readiness of the rover and to collect data which would be used to develop a series of intelligent imaging applications.
After initial preparation by the team in Bristol and some early workouts onsite, successful trials were completed during a suitable weather window with Indie easily managing to traverse large sections of the test terrain whilst gathering its data. A video of Indie traversing the beach can be found below.
As a prototype Mars Rover one of Indie’s main roles is to gather camera images of the terrain to allow analysis scientists to carry out a suitable science assessment. Indie is controlled and monitored using a system called OVERSEER which was developed by SciSys (as part of the Intelligent Robotic Porter System project), allowing high-fidelity control and monitoring of the rover during evaluation. OVERSEER remotely controlled Indie’s speed, direction and positioning of the camera pan and tilt unit from the on-site control centre. Indie acquired multiple sets of stereo camera images whilst the operators monitored its position, data quality and the rover health status using OVERSEER. A high resolution panorama image created from these images is available here (new window).
On Mars such real-time control will not be possible so the next set of trials will use the data acquired from this trip to test a number of autonomy applications that have been developed by SciSys and will be deployed as part of the final Proviscout field trials in a Martian analogue site such as Iceland.
Experts from a host of European and US organisations are participating in Proviscout and Provisg , coordinated by Joanneum Research and includes the lead localisation expert on the NASA Mars rovers who commended the team for their achievements with the Indie platform and the OVERSEER software.
More information on Indie and SciSys capabilities in Robotics and Autonomy can be found here.
A UK Space Agency report on all the activities at the beach can be found here.
