NASA Robot Sets Record for Autonomous Running Distance on Mars

Using its autonomous navigation system, NASA's Perseverance robot set a new record on Mars by driving straight through a particularly dangerous terrain. In return, this impressive journey helped scientists take advantage of many precious weeks of time to do more research, according toSpace. Although the mission team typically plots the robot's course manually, an automated navigation system called AutoNav has proven capable of guiding Perseverance safely around rocks that are hidden in images taken by the orbiter.

“That area is more rocky than anything Perseverance has ever been in before,” Del Sesto, deputy head of the Perseverance planning team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said on September 21. “We didn’t want to take a detour because it would take weeks. Longer runs mean less time for science, so we went straight,” Sesto said.

In late June 2023, Perseverance entered the boulder field known as Snowdrift Peak from the east. It first stopped to inspect two boulders, then, guided by AutoNav, rolled across the field. By the time it exited Snowdrift Peak in late July, it had traveled 759 meters. That’s slightly more than the 520 meters it would have traveled if it had traveled in a straight line.

NASA’s rovers have been protected in unfamiliar terrain by auto-navigators since 1997, when the first Mars rover, Sojourner, avoided dangerous rocks with a silicon-based navigation device. But it had such a small memory that it had to stop every 13 centimeters to navigate its surroundings. Now, Perseverance doesn’t need to stop to figure out where to go next, thanks to cameras and a computer that processes images, allowing AutoNav to plan its route in real time.