The Sojourner rover on Mars demonstrated some of the advantages of having mobile rovers on other planets. Sojourner, however, was mainly teleoperated, could not travel beyond range of the lander, and traveled only about 100 meters over a course of three months. NASA's upcoming missions to Mars call for rovers capable of traveling a hundred times further, and doing so autonomously. We are developing, and transferring to NASA, technologies for rough terrain navigation that will make this possible. The scientific benefits of being able to autonomously navigate on other planets is tremendous.
Autonomous navigation can cut that down to a day or two.
This leaves much more time for scientific data collection and rock sampling. In addition, autonomous rough terrain navigation has applications in many other areas, including agriculture, forestry, and military domains. Current NASA rovers are able to travel short distances autonomously, but do not fare well in very rough terrain. In particular, they are able to avoid discrete obstacles, but are not good at making decisions about terrain traversability, or about planning optimal global paths through the terrain. Morphin evaluates the goodness of various steering angles by integrating the traversability measures over paths generated for each steering angle.