Insect intelligence startup Opteran announces space rover trials with Airbus

Spun out from Sheffield University in 2020 Opteran has reverse-engineered natural insect brain algorithms into a commercially available software product known as Opteran Mind that enables autonomous machines to efficiently move through challenging environments without the need for extensive data or training.

As previously reported by The Engineer, the technology is already being deployed in a number of settings, including in advanced warehouse robots developed by German logistics specialist Safelog.

In this the latest initiative - which is being funded through the European Space Agency’s General Support Technology Programme - Opteran is conducting tests at the Airbus Defence and Space Mars Yard (a simulated Martian environment at the Airbus facility in Stevenage, Hertfordshire) exploring how its technology could enable rovers to understand depth perception in the toughest off-world environments.

Opteran CEO David Rajan told The Engineer that the technology has considerable advantages over existing approaches to autonomy in space robotics, which are typically reliant on power hungry and time-consuming approaches to computation. Whilst today’s off-world robots take minutes to compute a map of their surroundings from multiple cameras before every movement, Opteran’s visual and perception systems offer Mars rovers’ the ability to understand their surroundings in milliseconds, in challenging conditions, without adding to the robots critical power consumption. “Today, people use systems that need to gather a lot of data and compute it, and it takes minutes to compute,” he said. “We're doing it instantaneously at 90 frames per second, which means that the machines no longer have to stop to process the world around them.”