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by btown 4253 days ago
If you pair it with a laser scanner (which won't have any atmospheric interference to deal with on the moon!) you can get a near-perfect depth map without needing to do stereo correspondence (whose accuracy can be thrown off if there are identical features in nearby points - insert joke about all moon rocks looking the same). You could even throw a still DSLR with a telephoto lens on a perfectly calibrated, positionable mount, aim it at rocks in sequence, and get high-resolution textures. For bonus accuracy, have it so that the DSLR mount and the laser-scanner mount can swap positions, so you're getting the textures from the exact same position as the scanner. Send the depth map and textures back to Earth in non-real-time. Program the robot to autonomously explore regions where the depth map hasn't covered. Then on the client side, just feed those textures into a gaming engine or render farm. Bam. That would be a scalable Moon Explorer.