How to drive on Mars

I've been geeking out today with the research channel, enjoying this excellent lecture by Mark Maimone, Exploring Mars by 4-Wheel Drive. He's a machine vision researcher on the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers project, responsible for writing the autonomous driving software that guides the rovers. It's amazing technology. It's all basically done by taking sterio pictures and then building a terrain map from them, then working out a safe path through obstacles. What a job, having your software guide a robot on another plannet. It makes writing business applications seem somewhat mundane to say the least!