News Fly or Drive: Nvidia Jetson-Powered Morphobot Aims for NASA Mars Mission

[Admin]

CalTech's M4 Morphobot shows promise for search and rescue on Earth and as a rover on Mars.

Fly or Drive: Nvidia Jetson-Powered Morphobot Aims for NASA Mars Mission : Read more

 

[edzieba]

The Morphobot has nothing to do with Mars, and is designed for entirely terrestrial applications.

For the unique flight environment of Mars, the NASA proposal is to take the Ingenuity coaxial rotor helicopter and add wheels to the ends of the existing landing gear for ground mobility, rather than try and move the rotors about as wheels. A pair of these proposed vehicles were to co-land with the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle) as part of the MSR (Mars Sample Return) programme as a replacement for the dedicated 'fetch rover' and as a fallback in the event Perseverance cannot self-deliver samples to the MAV, but due to mass and budget overruns at JPL they have been cut from the baseline mission.

Mars isn’t the closest planet to Earth (that distinction goes to Venus)

On average, it's Mercury.

 

[Giroro]

I'm no air scientist, but those little propellers look like they need a lot of air to fly, but Mars doesn't have very much air.
I don't think it would fly on Mars with little propellers. But if you made the wheels a lot bigger so you could have much bigger propellers, then the wheels would be too heavy and awkward.
Also wheels get beaten up a lot, but you don't want the propellers to get damaged.
Which raises the question, "If we really have to have a tiny rover which also flies, why do the propellers need to be in the wheels?"
Then more generally, "Why would we bother sending a tiny rover that wouldn't be able to carry the important (and heavy) science-stuff that we want on Mars right now?"

It's a cool looking design for, like, a toy you want kids to buy. But I think this idea causes way more engineering problems than it solves.
I'm not sure this design was originally intended for Mars; I think they might have slapped that on as a marketing pitch to get funding.

 

[bit_user]

Why would we bother sending a tiny rover that wouldn't be able to carry the important (and heavy) science-stuff that we want on Mars right now?"

Ed's point about sample collection makes sense to me. I'm just not sure how heavy those (full) sample jars are.

Also, I think the roll that Ingenuity is currently performing is one of surveying and mission planning. Even with a limited payload, you can fly up (or down) to places you can't feasibly drive. I'd imagine there are probably a few scientific instruments small & light enough to fit as payloads of such a drone. Especially, if the payloads were modular and could be swapped out in situ.

 

[RichardtST]

Looks suspiciously like it needs to be on my Christmas list....

 

[USAFRet]

Also, I think the roll that Ingenuity is currently performing is one of surveying and mission planning.

Ingenuity is mostly a proof of concept.
"Can we fly an air vehicle on Mars at all?"

Result - Yes.

So far, the max horizontal distance is 704 meters, and a max altitude of 18 meters.

Mars Helicopter - NASA

The Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another planet for the first time.

mars.nasa.gov

 

[bit_user]

Ingenuity is mostly a proof of concept.
"Can we fly an air vehicle on Mars at all?"

Result - Yes.

Yes, it was originally proposed as just an experiment in itself. That's why the only payload it has is basically a GoPro camera.

However, once they concluded their planned flight & maneuverability tests, they said they were looking at other ways to use it to augment or facilitate their mission.

An important aspect of Ingenuity is that its flight is autonomous. It's controlled by a mid-range Snapdragon smartphone SoC from like 2016, so that might be a limiting factor in the complexity of its flight plans. Even so, I think it's interesting that little SoC is like 100x as powerful as the CPU in the Curiosity rover that's like Ingenuity's mothership.

So far, the max horizontal distance is 704 meters, and a max altitude of 18 meters.

They probably don't want to risk falling out of communication with the Curiosity rover. Also, as Ingenuity has a limited battery capacity, I'm not sure what its maximum range would even be.

 

[USAFRet]

They probably don't want to risk falling out of communication with the Curiosity rover. Also, as Ingenuity has a limited battery capacity, I'm not sure what its maximum range would even be.

Perseverance rover, not Curiosity...

So far, the max flying time is a bit under 3 mins.
Range is associated with payload, speed, batt capacity, altitude.

Everything is a tradeoff.

If you've ever flown a little quadrotor here on the mother planet, you'd know what I mean.


But this whole thing is insanely cool. Flying a little helicopter on Mars...