We've been working with geologists from Western for several years now to look at how geological investigations could be done on other planets using robotics. One thing we've learned is that a lot of the interesting places are not on flat ground but rather up on vertical surfaces where stratigraphy, for example, can be seen. Enter vSCOUT, a mobile robot with a powered rope ascender to allow it to drive on near-vertical surfaces. Today we demonstrated that we could successfully drive up and down the MarsDome at UTIAS under manual control. The next step will be to do this autonomously using visual navigation and eventually we want to build photorealistic 3D models and more.
