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 Universitaet, 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 Universitaet, West Virginia University, the Centro de Astrobiologia 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 colors and textures and communicates back to the astrobiologist the degree of similarity to previous images stored in the database.
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