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Curtis L. Olson
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For those planets and moons that support an atmosphere (e.g. Mars, Venus, Titan and Jupiter), flying robots, or aerobots, are likely to provide a practical solution to the problem of extended planetary surface coverage for terrain mapping and surface/subsurface composition surveying. Not only could such devices be used for suborbital mapping of terrain regions, but they could be used to transport and deploy science packages or even microrovers at different geographically separate landing sites.
Much attention has been given to the use of planetary rovers for exploration, but whilst they are clearly competent at facilitating useful science, their application is terrain limited. Aerobots, in comparison, have no such limitations.
The technological challenges posed by planetary aerobots are significant, and members of the Intelligent Robotics Group at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, are investigating the design and control of aerobots that can fly autonomously to designated landing sites. To investigate this problem we are building a virtual environment to simulate autonomous aerobot flight. Our simulator uses the FlightGear software system and incorporates 'realistic' meteorological conditions and Martian terrain.
We are using the NaSt3DGP computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package to generate meteorological conditions. The meteorological data is 'loaded' into the FlightGear simulator to create realistic wind effects acting upon an aerobot when flying over a given terrain. The terrain model used by both FlightGear and NaSt3DGP is obtained from the MGS Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) instrument, and the Mars Climate Database (MCD) is used to initialise the CFD simulation.
For further information see http://users.aber.ac.uk/dpb/aerobots.html