I saw an interesting video about the first drone that flew on Mars. They programmed the flights in advance and it then executed them autonomously. I think that is even more impressive, since it would not have been possible to intervene if something went wrong. At the time the data was received, the drone already landed
It’s pretty amazing our first try at a fully autonomous helicopter on another planet flew and landed successfully 71 times. Rest in peace, Ingenuity.
IIRC that was part of the mission? They wanted to push themselves to see what could and could not be done with a very strict budget and cheap commonly available parts and tools.
And that’s using the same hardware as you have in your phone. Not similar, the same.A snapdragon 801. Such as used in Galaxy S5, from 2014.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_devices_using_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_systems_on_chips
Snapdragon took care of image processing, guidance processing, and storing flight data—with readings 500 times a second—while the microcontroller was in charge of navigation and running the helicopter’s motors.
I am not downplaying the supreme engineering of the mars rover team, especially because there is no GPS on mars, but DJI has pre-programmed drone flights that work with their consumer drones, called missions.
https://developer.dji.com/doc/mobile-sdk-tutorial/en/basic-introduction/basic-concepts/missions.html
I’ve been thinking about setting up a mission for my drone to fly every week to gather data about what my neighborhood is like throughout the year.
Well they used a camera to track features on the ground for navigating, but then flew into a sandy area with to few features and crashed xD To be fair it was never intended to leave the initially planned area in the first place. And they made the most out of it, the drone is now a lil weather station reporting temp and pressure
