Bruno Mars: The British-made robot aiming to beat NASA to find life on the Red Planet - but is still 'confused' by craters

It is the British-made robot aiming to beat NASA to discover life on Mars with the unique ability to map its own route and steer itself, but the state-of-the art device has just one flaw - it gets confused by shadows.

The prototype, named Bruno, is part of a £946 million project to send a robot to the Red Planet in 2018.

It is able to produce its own 3D map of the area ahead of it and plot its own path.

But the only drawback is the robot gets confused by the large shadows created by craters and caves.

Scientists have now enlisted the help of Major Tim Peake to remotely steer the robot in tests to help them find a solution.

Major Peake will operate Bruno remotely from the International Space Station.

His mission will be to drive the robot into a make-shift cave, which will replicate the conditions on Mars, where he will seek out targets marked with an "X".

"There are caves on Mars and craters that cast long shadows," said Airbus Defence & Space communications director Jeremy Close.

"To explore those areas, it's more efficient to have a human in the loop."

Bruno's creators, Airbus Defence & Space in Stevenage, have created a testing site in a giant hangar containing 250 tonnes of sand strewn with artificial boulders, against a backdrop of panoramic photos from Mars.

Head of science Dr Ralph Cordey talked about the machine's unique ability to steer itself around obstacles.

He said: "One of the challenges of going to Mars is that it's so far away in terms of the time it takes radio signals to go there and back - around 40 minutes.

"It's not possible to drive this sort of machine with a joystick. You'll crash it. So this rover is designed to be semi-autonomous. It can produce its own 3D map of the area ahead of it, look where it's being asked to go, and plot its own path.

"It's aware that some rocks it can't get over and has to drive round, and it can see ditches and sense what slopes are safe to climb."

It means that while previous planetary rovers have had to sit idle for considerable periods of time awaiting control instructions to be beamed up from the operators back on Earth, Bruno will be able to decide on his own course across the planet's uneven, boulder-strewn surface.

The human controllers simply provide the coordinates of a target location and Bruno works out how best to get there.

Scientists will be starting assembling the final model this year which will be sent to Mars as part of the ExoMars mission, which took off last week.

Bruno belongs to a "family" of three rover prototypes - the others are named Bridget and Bryan.

In two years time a so far nameless six-wheeled machine with a "brain" similar to Bruno's will be launched to the Red Planet.

There it will look for signs of life in soil samples from six feet below the arid surface and take colour images of the surrounding landscape.

The finished rover will have a drill that can bore down two metres below the surface and extract samples to be analysed in its on-board laboratory.

Unlike any Mars rover before it, the ExoMars rover will look for biochemical signatures of life.

The planned landing site is a flat equatorial region known as Oxia Planum where there is geological evidence of surface water long ago.

A colour panoramic camera mounted on a mast in the centre of the machine will capture unmatched images of the planet.

"It will have the ability to put you there in a 3D colour environment, as if you were on Mars," Dr Cordeysaid.

"It will help answer one of the really deep down questions that we have.

"You stop and look up into the night sky and wonder, is there life out there? We've now got the engineering and science capability to start trying to answer that question. It's not just in the realms of sci-fi - there are good reasons for believing there could have been life on Mars early in its life, just as there was on Earth."

Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson said: "It's fantastic that technologies developed and built in the UK will soon be exploring the Red Planet, helping answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars.

"We want the UK to be at the forefront of major discoveries like this, which is why we are one of the biggest contributors to the Exo-Mars project through the European Space Agency."