NASA Lets Curiosity Rover Loose on Mars in Autonomous Driving Mode

It is constantly amazing to me that we have a robot (two robots!) driving around on Mars right now. On MARS. If we were being grumpy about it, however, we might call a robot like Curiosity a (very sophisticated) remote controlled vehicle, since it’s “driven” by humans back here on Earth. Only, it isn’t anymore, not entirely: on Tuesday, JPL gave Curiosity her head, letting the rover decide where to drive itself. [Read More]