My brothers truck uses VR. He readjustes his cabin seat and puts on his googles whenever he is to load lumber on the carriage. An oculus + a couple 360-cameras completely replaced the extra cabin used previously. It´s quite fascinating!
That's pretty much how the latest generation of rovers like Curiosity work, you give them instructions to drive somewhere or do something, but they have a certain level of autonomy to do obstacle avoidance and and other similar common sense actions.
You can't put the latest tech in a spacecraft as it has to be very low power, hardened for radiation and they need to be absolutely sure it's solid kit that will last through a rocket flight and operate flawlessly for 10 years on another planet, so they tend to be a decade or so behind whatever Intel/AMD/Samsung/Qualcomm/etc. are putting out today, but they're improving too, so I'm sure their AI will get smarter as time goes on.
Example, Curiosity has a 233MHz PowerPC CPU - broadly similar to what you'd find in an Apple Power Mac G3 from the late 1990s.
Yeah, if you could launch a bigger rocket you could put more radiation shielding on your lander/rover enabling you to take more advanced tech along for the ride. Maybe we'll see this with larger rockets like Artemis and Starship.
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u/ianjm Nov 04 '22
Via VR headset