The Steam Deck Is Being Used to Test Mars Rovers

The Steam Deck has been around for four years at this point, and while I mostly use it to play Ball x Pit while I watch TV, scientists at Airbus in the UK have used it to test the the ExoMars Rover.

In a video published by YouTuber Tom Scott, an Airbus senior engineer walks him through progress on the new rover, which is being tested in a simulated Mars setting. Ultimately, this rover will be controlled autonomously through mounted 3D cameras thanks to the distance between Mars and Earth, but for now, it has to be controlled locally with a computer.

Initially, she gives the prototype rover instructions through a laptop, telling it to go forward. Later on in the video, Scott is handed a Steam Deck that's running some kind of custom program, which allows him to control a different prototype rover in real time thanks to the controller that's built into the handheld.

Unfortunately, the video doesn't go into a lot of detail about what's actually being run on the Steam Deck, but it isn't the first time Valve's handheld has been used to control robotics; a couple of years ago, fans spotted Disney operators using the Steam Deck to control droids at Galaxy's Edge. Due to the open nature of Valve's hardware, it's likely that the Steam Deck is being used for all kinds of things we don't know about.

That's a fate that's probably going to be shared for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame as well. All of these devices are running on Linux and make no effort to stop users from installing different programs or even operating systems, so it's only natural that they're being used for things other than gaming.

Back when I interviewed Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat for the Steam Machine, they seemed completely open to this, with Aldehayyat telling me, "I don't think it's a coincidence that a good PC is also a good gaming device. At the end of the day, good hardware is good hardware. So in a lot of ways, the challenges you're trying to solve are, a lot of them are pretty much the same." I'm sure that Valve didn't envision the Steam Deck being used to test Mars rovers, but it's still in the spirit of people finding different ways to use the hardware.

The side effect of the Deck, Machine, and Frame being open for things other than gaming is that the hardware is more expensive. Because Valve doesn't lock down its hardware at all, there's nothing stopping scientists from buying Steam Decks just because they happen to be great for controlling robotics, rather than buying and playing games from the Steam store.

It's going to be especially interesting to see the different ways the Steam Frame is used in the future. I can only imagine what scientists will be able to do with an open VR headset with all kinds of motion-tracking capabilities. If the Steam Deck is being used to control Mars Rovers, just imagine what the Steam Frame will be able to do.