I really like the idea of people getting points. I bet you could even charge people to take complete control of a bot for some amount of time.

Thanks for helping the idea evolve. I like evolving ideas.

R

http://kotaku.com/5333020/late.....ch-on-mars

Space robots must be fairly autonomous to be able to do much of anything. They receive high-level objectives from Earth and then do a lot of their own problem-solving to carry out their orders: navigate to these coordinates, take some samples, etc… They have to be able to negotiate some really challenging terrain and make a lot of decisions independent of human input. So these spider bots will need some serious brains on board if they’re to be of any use in space.

Your idea of publicly accessible space exploration may still be possible, though, through virtualization technologies like Google Earth. Robots could be guided collectively by thousands of online participants identifying interesting features to examine more closely. Low-res terrain models and texture maps would be provided by fly-overs. Online participants could pilot a virtual vehicle across this low-res surface, much like a video game. But collectively, their decisions could provide guidance cues to small swarms of robots which could navigate ahead to fill in more detail. It still wouldn’t be anywhere close to real-time with round-trip latency up to 40 minutes, but the purpose is exploration, not entertainment. Nevertheless, there could be objectives, such as searching for water ice or other resources, finding locations suitable for building a base, gathering data for scientific research, etc… Points could be awarded to the online volunteer explorers proportional to their relative contributions in guiding the robots to meet these objectives. I think that would be pretty damn entertaining, and I’d feel proud to participate in real science rather than a mindless game.

Anyway, thanks for your ideas.

I looked into the Cubesat and that would be a good way of increasing bandwidth. Also, the spider-bot could be made to fit within the Cubesat dimensions, to minimize launch costs.

How would we partner with the GLXP? We could use this technology to expand the Google Mars and Moon service, with time dependent pictures people can explore.