Drive a Rover on Mars

Richard McElligott writes "Hi, the Active Robotics Lab at University of Reading has put up an online networked robot that can roam around a simulated martian landscape. All you need is sun java from www.java.com and you can view streaming online video and control the rover around the landscape using only your browser."

Red Rover network

[Bamfarooni]

This is actually part of a very large network of control-it-over-the-internet rovers, called Red Rover. There's a handful listed here:

http://planetary.org/rrgtm/Rrsites.php [planetary.org]

Right.

[noselasd]

I'm sure I'll be able to do that *now*.
Thank you /.

Re:Right.

[GreenHell]

I won't be satisfied until all the conflicting requests cause the robot to burst into flames.

Three Strikes for U.S. readers

[freaksta]

1. Its running off a UK domain 2. Its running a JAVA applet 3. It just got slashdotted. Good Luck!

Well...

[ERJ]

Well, that was fun....

No, wait, the other word....tedious.

version in the US

[Gkeeper80]

There is a version of this in the US. The Smithsonian museums have a "Mars Rover" that roams around a specially build terrain. It's computer controlled, although I haven't seen it hooked up to the Internet. It uses standard 802.11b to tell the rover how to move and there's a special java program that runs on a local work station.

You give the rover a destination, and a degree of rotation from it's current location, it then navigates the rocks and even goes around them if they are too big. The whole time it's sending back images to the workstation.

I got to run this thing for 5 hours at my local Space Day [spaceday.org] at a Smithsonian hanger in Dulles Airport. It was great for the first few times, but I got sick of explaining the thing to kids by the end. There are 3 on tour through the US now.