We honor the 400th anniversary of the publication of "Don Quijote de la Mancha" (1605) by Cervantes by using the title character and his exploits to illustrate the aspirations, journeys and improving-perception capabilities of our Cyborg Astrobiologist computer-vision system.
The Cyborg Astrobiologist's hardware consists of a raster-capable camcorder connected by a Firewire cable to wearable computer, together with a human operator. The Cyborg Astrobiologist's software consists of an image-segmentation algorithm and a technique to search for uncommon regions in an image.
In order to give better context to our work, we give a introduction from an outsider's point-of-view of some of the capabilities and results from the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, including a discussion of autonomy, hazard avoidance, exploration of Eagle Crater in Meridiani Planum by MER Opportunity, and future Mars exploration.
With Don AstrobioQuijote and his "armor" of a wearable computer and his "lance" of a camcorder, we present computer-vision exploration results from several missions at two different field sites in Spain, one with white gypsum cliffs and the other with red sandstone outcrops. The image-segmentation and uncommon-mapping technique that we developed for the Cyborg Astrobiologist's wearable computer performed admirably in the field, yet there is much room for improvement. Through a potential collaboration with researchers in Girona (Catalonia, Spain), we hope to improve the image segmentation in the coming months to handle color and texture simultaneously. Later this year, we also hope to use the image segmentation and the uncommon-mapping technique to autonomously guide a robotic borehole-inspection system as part of the NASA/Ames--Spain "Mars Analog" underground-drilling collaboration (M.A.R.T.E.) in SW Andalucia, Spain.
BACKGROUND INFO: http://www.cab.inta.es/~CYBORG/cyborg.summary.html