"NASA has revealed it repurposed the processor the Perseverance rover used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, to help the rolling robot navigate the Red Planet autonomously "for potentially unlimited distances." The aerospace agency revealed the hack last week in a post that says it used the rover's Helicopter Base Station (HBS) because its processor is 100 times faster than the rover's other kit."
"NASA has previously said the HBS runs a Qualcomm 801 processor, a model the mobile chip giant lists as running four custom Krait CPUs using Arm-compatible cores of the company's own design, an Adreno 330 GPU and a Hexagon digital signal processor. The Register 's coverage reports the models on Mars run at 2.26GHz and packs 2GB RAM plus 32GB flash memory, and that NASA ran Linux on the machine."
"With Ingenuity now permanently grounded after flying 72 missions, the HBS was idle. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's chief engineer of robotics operations Vandi Verma therefore pondered reusing the hardware. NASA calls the new workload it created for the SoC "Mars Global Localization" and in its post describes it as featuring "an algorithm that rapidly compares panoramic images from the rover's navigation cameras with onboard orbital terrain maps.""
NASA repurposed the Perseverance rover's Helicopter Base Station (HBS) processor to run a new workload called Mars Global Localization. The HBS uses a Qualcomm 801 SoC running Linux and is roughly 100 times faster than the rover's other processors. The Mars Global Localization algorithm rapidly compares panoramic navigation-camera images with onboard orbital terrain maps to determine rover position. The algorithm takes about two minutes to pinpoint location within roughly 10 inches (25 centimeters) and has been used operationally. The capability enables Perseverance to determine its own location on Mars and to drive autonomously for much longer, potentially unlimited, distances.
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