Robot helping simulate Mars mapping

LOVELAND – A robot developed by Loveland’s innovative RoadNarrows Robotics LLC has completed its mission to map the Mars-like high desert of Utah, aiding scientists’ objective to someday use similar technology to plot terrain features of faraway planets.

RoadNarrows sent its Kuon robotic vehicle to rove the rugged terrain of the Mars Desert Research Center near Hanksville, Utah, west of Canyonlands National Park. The research center is maintained by the Lakewood-based Mars Society, a nonprofit exploration advocacy organization that conducts two-week mock missions to the red planet between December and May.

The 3-foot-long Kuon can haul as much as 400 pounds and is now operated by a person using an Xbox controller. RoadNarrows plans to eventually program the robot to respond to voice commands from people so it can operate autonomously, collecting information and relaying it back to a person.

As part of the living-on-Mars exercise earlier this year, a crew of space enthusiasts used Kuon as a sort of Mars rover. They wore spacesuits as they guided Kuon through rolling hills of red sand to map the area.

“Robotics is going to be key to any of our (space) exploration,´ said Robin Knight, RoadNarrows’ chief technology officer. “It’s dangerous and too expensive to send an astronaut, suit them up and have them walk out. Obviously, robots don’t breathe air, so you can go much farther.”

The Loveland robot’s Utah visit comes amid growing interest in robotics nationwide. Google recently has made big investments in robotics and auto manufacturers have increasingly incorporated them in vehicles.

The multi-billion-dollar robotics market has seen growth particularly in automotive robotics, a market that has only begun to take off, said Thilo Koslowski, vice president and distinguished analyst for automotive technology at Gartner Inc. Many of the companies in the U.S. robotics industry are small in size, as is RoadNarrows.

“We’re getting to the point where a lot of these technologies are actually well understood,” Koslowski said.

“They’re now much more feasible to acquire and put together” through the use of software, he said.

In addition to developing Kuon, named after the beast that guarded the gates of the Greek underworld in Homer’s “Iliad,” RoadNarrows sells educational and research robots to universities nationwide.
Kai Staats, a documentary filmmaker and former business consultant for RoadNarrows, delivered Kuon to the Mars Desert Research Station in January. Staats filmed the exercise as a member of the six-person Mars Society’s Mars Crew 134.

Staats helped the mission’s lead robotics engineer, Ewan Reid of robotics company Neptec Design Group Ltd. in Kanata, Ontario, outfit the Kuon for its role on the Mars mission. They mounted the vehicle with a laptop, Global Positioning Systems receiver and other technology to make a three-dimensional map of the terrain as the Kuon drove through it.

Similar technology someday could be applied to mapping Mars.

“The goal is to use that kind of technology and that kind of imaging for remotely mapping terrain prior to human arrival,” Staats said. “We could send it off for a couple days on its own to do 3-D mapping faster and more accurately than a human walking around.”

RoadNarrows employees, meanwhile, worked with the living-on-Mars crew to troubleshoot any problems that came up during the exercise.

The idea of the mock Mars mission was to prepare people for the kind of research and scenarios that could take place on the red planet, Mars Society spokesman Michael Stoltz said. Crew members study subjects in their areas of expertise such as biology, nutrition and human factors during the missions.

Although humans may someday land on Mars, Kuon will not join the mission because Mars’ environment would be much too harsh. Kuon did, however, help crew members better understand the challenges of using a robot to remotely map terrain prior to human arrival and exploration.

Kuon also has broader industrial applications.

The 250-pound, steel robotic vehicle could be equipped with infrared cameras and used by the oil and gas industry to detect natural-gas leaks from wells. It can be programmed with a computer to perform various tasks, so a variety of other industries could use it.

Like Kuon, robots of the near future will look more like machines controlled by software and designed to perform specific tasks rather than the anthropomorphic droids depicted in movies.
In the not-so-distant future, for example, robotic cars will be able to park themselves after dropping off their owners at a shopping mall or going out to dinner, Gartner’s Koslowski said.
“This is coming fairly soon,” he said.

Steve Lynn can be reached at 970-232-3147 or slynn@ncbr.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevelynnncbr.

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