new advanced technologies in this area. In 2021, a United Nations group of government experts, known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons – Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, held a conference to highlight the ethical concerns which arise from the increasingly advanced technology for autonomous robots to wield weapons and to play a military role. Technical development Space probes The Mars rovers MER-A and MER-B (now known as Spirit rover and Opportunity rover) found the position of the Sun and navigated their own routes to destinations, on the fly, by: Mapping the surface with 3D vision Computing safe and unsafe areas on the surface within that field of vision Computing optimal paths across the safe area towards the desired destination Driving along the calculated route; Repeating this cycle until either the destination is reached, or there is no known path to the destination The planned ESA Rover, Rosalind Franklin rover, is capable of vision based relative localisation and absolute localisation to autonomously navigate safe and efficient trajectories to targets by: Reconstructing 3D models of the terrain surrounding the Rover using a pair of stereo cameras Determining safe and unsafe areas of the terrain and the general "difficulty" for the Rover to navigate the terrain Computing efficient paths across the safe area towards the desired destination Driving the Rover along the planned path Building up a navigation map of all previous navigation data During the final NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge in 2016, a rover, named Cataglyphis, successfully demonstrated fully autonomous navigation, decision-making, and sample detection, retrieval, and return capabilities. The rover relied on a fusion of measurements from inertial sensors, wheel encoders, Lidar, and camera for navigation and mapping, instead of using GPS or magnetometers. During the 2 hour challenge, Cataglyphis traversed over 2.6 km and returned five different samples to its starting position. General-use autonomous robots The Seekur robot was the first commercially available robot to demonstrate MDARS-like capabilities for general use by airports, utility plants, corrections facilities and Homeland Security. The DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge have encouraged development of even more autonomous capabilities for ground vehicles, while this has been the demonstrated goal for aerial robots since 1990 as part of the AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition. Between 2013 and 2017, TotalEnergies has held the ARGOS Challenge to develop the first autonomous robot for oil and gas production sites.