A novel, hybrid part-human, part-machine visual system that
uses a simple mobile phone camera has been developed to search for evidence of
past or present life in planetary analogue sites on Earth. Patrick McGuire from
the Freie Universität, Berlin, will present results from this Cyborg
Astrobiologist at the European Planetary Science Congress in London on Monday
9th September.
Members of McGuire's team, which include researchers from
the Freie Universität, West Virginia University, the Centro de Astrobiología in
Madrid and the University of Malta have been working for over a decade towards
giving more scientific autonomy to robotic rovers in choosing the most
promising sites for geological and astrobiological investigation. In the Cyborg
Astrobiologist system, initially the human astrobiologist takes images of
his/her surroundings using a mobile phone camera. These images are sent to via
Bluetooth to a laptop, which processes the images to detect novel colours and
textures and communicates back to the astrobiologist the degree of similarity
to previous images stored in the database.