The robotic arm on NASA's Curiosity rover should set a new standard for robotic operations on Mars — and it could revolutionize robotics on Earth as well.
The robotic arm cleared the last of its commissioning tests last Thursday, November 8th 2012, and is now ready for duty on Gale Crater. Just based on metrics alone, Curiosity's arm is in a class by itself: It's twice as long as the arm that was installed on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and is tipped with a turnable, twistable turret that weighs 30 kilograms (66 pounds).
That turret is bristling with instruments — including an X-ray spectrometer, a fine-resolution camera, a scoop and some sifters, a dust-sweeping brush, and a percussive drill that can smash rock to bits for analysis in the rover's onboard chemistry labs. The arm is designed to press that drill against the rock with a force of 300 Newton (67 pounds), which is more of a push than a construction worker generally uses for overhead drilling on Earth.
It's a formidable machine, which has to be managed with care from a distance of 175 million miles (282 million kilometers). That's what the colleagues on the robotic-arm team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been working to avoid: They tested all the sequences the arm is expected to run in advance, in simulations and a robotic test bed. Now the same tests have been run on the actual rover. There were no surprises on Earth, and no surprises so far on Mars, either.
engineering group authors: Andy Alfonso, Michael Molina and Nicola Delloca
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