Lunar rovers will be equipped with Nvidia GPUs to help them quickly map the surface of the Moon and communicate with Earth.
Robotics firm Lunar Outpost has been selected by Nasa to take part in its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, which sees it pay private firms to explore the surface of the Moon ahead of an eventual manned landing.
Its lander will use Nvidia’s Jetson platform to generate terrain maps, plan autonomous paths and process them as well as operate with “increasing independence”. The processors also support real-time video streaming from the Moon to Earth.
It takes about 1.3 seconds for a radio signal to travel from the Moon to Earth, and another 1.3 seconds for the response to get back. This means that driving a rover in real-time via a joystick from Mission Control is impossible over rugged, unknown terrain.
The Jetson platform itself is based on ARM and designed to be low power while enabling machine learning applications. This makes it particularly suited...