BotJunkie

There are automated "alert brokers" that will filter these alerts to make them manageable- you can subscribe to phenomena that you're interested in and get only those alerts.

I visited there a few months ago, and satellites are not a big concern for Rubin in particular. It will visit every part of the sky over 800 times and add all those images together, and since the satellite trails won't cover the same things every time the overall impact on data is minimal. They estimate less than 1%, so the plan is to just run the survey for 1% longer.

Personally (and to some extent, professionally) I make a distinction between robotics and automation. In robotics, I look for a distinct, physically embodied system that can make decisions based on its environment and alter that environment by changing its behavior. Automation is much more limited and requires a much more structured environment. But it's all a matter of perspective.

I'm the author of this piece, and I'm happy to tell you where it came from.

I was at a robotics conference in Boulder last spring, where some folks from Lely presented a paper on their robotic code of conduct. I hadn't heard of robots for cows before, and thought it was fascinating. I happened to be in Rotterdam last fall for another conference, which was close enough to the Lely headquarters for a visit.

Lely is somewhat unique in that they're a robotics company rather than an agricultural machinery company that also makes some robots. There are a few other companies that make robotic systems like these, but Lely is the largest by a significant margin. Farms will often choose what brand of robot to buy based on what service center is closest to them, in case something goes wrong. I believe that Lely promises that they'll have someone on-site to fix (or, start fixing) a broken robot within about 2 hours.

The majority of farms who switch to these robots keep them- an expert that we talked to said that it's not common to go back, and only a small percentage do.

I wrote this story, which originated entirely from a single picture on brr [1], an Antarctica blog that has wonderful, detailed descriptions about how the South Pole station functions.

[1]: https://brr.fyi/

This paper is based on the performance at the 2022 event, but it took this long to write it up and get it published.

The tracking system was used during all of the races for data collection of both the autonomous and human-piloted drones, which is why the reflective markers are visible.

They did do some demonstrations of the drones controlled with the tracking cameras, and they were significantly faster, but the vision-based drones were definitely able to fly faster than the human pilots in some races.

This is all the next step. If they end up putting together an actual mission proposal, they can factor in power budgets for specific science instruments, sun angles and seasonality at the landing site, etc, but they're not quite there yet.

Not sure what you mean by limited operating time, though- if you mean that MSH has to spend 50% of its time charging, that's true, but relative to a rover, it can travel so much farther and faster that JPL is arguing it more than makes up for it.

It's hard to get a good sense of scale from the image, but the solar panel on the concept is about 0.5m in diameter. JPL has run the numbers as part of their engineering study, and MSH would be able to recharge itself in a day.

You can see how the whole thing would fold up in the linked article, there's an image from the white paper that shows MSH fitting into the same size aeroshell Mars Pathfinder used. It would run on solar power and recharge itself, just like Ingenuity.

JPL has run the numbers on this as part of the engineering study. The solar panel shown in the concept image (in the center) charges a battery that gives MSH a 10km range or 5 minutes of hover time after charging for a day. It would have its own comms that could reach orbit.

The most likely way for MSH to get funded in the near term is as part of NASA's sample return goals. 5kg of science payload is not insubstantial, but even if MSH's primary instrument was just a sampling tool, it could still do some unique stuff. It could collect otherwise inaccessible samples from across a very wide area, and then bring them all back to a centralized location, which a rover can't do very well.

I asked Bob about this. There are a bunch of options, but one way to do it is that you use a hollow projectile that takes a core sample, and then you just reel back in the core while the rest of the projectile stays in place.

I interviewed Bob and wrote this article, so I can answer a few of these.

I think JPL's idea is that MSH would be a dedicated helicopter mission, rather than piggybacking on some other mission, so it wouldn't be eating up the mass budget of another lander or rover.

Similar to Ingenuity, the flights would be autonomous but the science wouldn't be. MSH would fly up to a cliff face (or whatever), take pictures, land, ask Earth where to sample, and then make a second flight to do the sampling.

MSH would be able to communicate with orbit directly and would not need rover or lander support.

If you're looking for a better resolution version of the concept image, as far as I know there isn't one. The original is here, and it's not great: https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tasks/showBrowseImage.cfm?...

I'm the author of this. It was certainly surprising to learn that a lot of what AVs are doing right now is limited by the amount of power available to the computers. It didn't make it into the article in full, but we were told that in general more computing power means detecting and classifying more object types, tracking those objects over longer periods of time, and doing more detailed motion prediction and planning across longer time horizons. They were explicit that the power they can squeeze out of the vehicle's alternator is currently a significant limiting factor to the performance of the system.

I wrote the article; thanks for this info. Since your sister has posted this publicly on her Twitter account, I'll happily add her name to our article if I can get in touch with her/BD to confirm. [Edited to add that we'll contact her before doing so.]