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Autonomous vehicles can be many be of many types, like cars, helicopters, airplanes, but also submarines, trucks, space-probes and so on. What is unique to them is that they can perform a predefined mission without or with very little human intervention.

As the day when people walks on Mars getting closer and closer, the need for autonomous vehicles that can explore and do other tasks like moving cargo, shaping terrain, constructing base camps and so on becomes very high. On Mars such vehicles would be invaluable as they can prepare and safe an area before people arrive, but also on Earth they can increase productivity and free people for other more complex tasks.

In order for automated vehicles to be able to perform their tasks a multitude of sensors and algorithms may be needed like;

• Collision avoidance (radar, lidar, sonar ...)
• Threat/risk detection (detection of other vehicles, people and fixed objects that might become a problem in the future)
• Risk assesment (determine probabilty of accident even if no threat/risk has been detected)
• Mapping of surrounding (find obstacles and use fixed ones as reference for navigation)
• Positioning (GPS, inertial navigation (accelerometer, gyro, altimeter, compass ...), beacons ...)
• Route optimization (e.g. to find shortest path with least risk and that avoids most obstacles)

Typically the most common automation in a home is the heater/airconditioner temparature control. However these temparature controllers are usually very limited and only regulate temparure to a preset value.

Improvements in this area could be to automatically detect when someone is at home and allow the temparature off by some deegrees when no-one is at home to conserve energy, and restore the temperature in time to a person gets home. Also, to save even more energy ventilation could also be regulated by measuring air quality (co2, moist and dust particles) so the ventilation can be reduced when air quality is high and especially when no-one is at home.

In order to maximize energy saving without causing discomfort, statistics of when people are at home and tracking of e.g mobile phone can be used to predict when the heat/AC and ventilation has to be restored to normal operation.