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The film tells a story about the life of the Mars rover Curiosity turned autonomous. It is shown as a single day, using generative models with data from the archives of real cameras on-board of the rover. Curiosity awakens, discovers the limits of its body, explores the area around it and finds an interesting object for follow-up scientific observations. It is then faced with the failing of its own sensors and perhaps its own sensibility. Can an autonomous system ponder about existential questions?
This film mirrors the plans for having autonomous robots on other planetary bodies and draws parallels between the chapters in Curiosity's life and the cycle of human development. Individually, as developmental stages, loosely based on Erikson’s stages of human development, and collectively on larger scale of development of life from simple to complex organisms.
The real Curiosity rover has been active since 2012 on Mars and is sending images daily from an array of in total 17 cameras. Only a subset of these cameras was selected for this project: the Hazard Avoidance Cameras (HazCams), the Navigation Cameras (NavCams) and the ChemCam instrument. So far, the rover was active over 3714 Sols (which equals to 3815 Earth days) and has sent over half a million scientific images; however, some of its cameras suffer from sensory degradation. The audio recordings are also from the surface of the Mars, using archival data from the Perseverance Rover which was equipped with a device capable of recording sounds. The Perseverance is also the first Rover to use an autonomous AI algorithm for target selection of interesting rock formations for follow-up spectroscopy. Image credit goes to the public archives of NASA/JPL-Caltech.
