And where, pray tell, would you find battle tested libraries for flying a drone on Mars?
I'm also reasonably certain that the drone isn't running Android, and that not doing so is the correct design choice.
I'm also reasonably certain that the drone isn't running Android, and that not doing so is the correct design choice.
Considering Qualcomm never releases their kernel sources, I am really worried that NASA might have been forced to use a modified Android system.
Most likely they just used the specific kernel version with closed binary blobs from Qualcomm for a typical embedded Linux, not the full Android system.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting the thing should run android.
But if you are writing something yourself then looking at what existing libraries already (and more importantly their test suites!) do is a good idea.
Maybe they did and maybe they didn't in this case, hard to know with the data available.
this isn't magic. Image processing isn't a wholly unknown field when under the influence of Martian gravity.
It's a staggering achievement, and a testament to humankind's ability to wrangle technology, but -- to be frank here -- visual odometry is technology from 1960s era spy planes, not beyond-human voodoo.
Sometimes errors are stupid ones, even if the stupidity is causing problems a zillion miles away on distant unknown frontiers being first-explored by human kind.
tl;dr : This visual odometry problem isn't a space problem, it's a computer science problem -- one that has been encountered by numerous people even here on earth.
The repercussions of such a simple non-space-problem might very well turn into space problems when the craft crashes, however -- and that's a damn shame given that this particular set of problems has been encountered-and-fixed by numerous earthlings over and over again.
super tl;dr : as an only half-informed-participant in this discussion I bet this problem is NIH-syndrome-related, a problem NASA has encountered a lot in the past, a problem that's entirely managerial and very hard to eradicate.
We have plenty of faux-mars environments to practice these techniques on. NASA even has their own.
many of the toy indoor-use drones use such techniques for attitude/altitude-hold features when under a roof.