Autonomous Detection of Dust Devils and Clouds on Mars

Abstract

Acquisition of science in space applications is shifting from teleoperated gathering to an automated on-board analysis with improvements in the use of memory, CPU, bandwidth and data quality. In this paper, we describe algorithms to autonomously detect dust devils and clouds from a rover and summarize the results. The algorithms meet high hit-to-miss ratios and satisfy strict resource constraints. Both detectors have been uploaded to the Mars exploration rovers (MER). These are the first autonomous science processes in the rovers.