If our world-wide herculean efforts towards building a self driving robotic car have yielded mediocre results, I have low expectations for a robotic field geologist built on a NASA budget.
Also note that even with the limitations, the humans surveyed more ground. Remove the limitation by making the rover a mobile habitat and now the humans can have an even more expansive and productive mission.
Ultimately we're going to colonize space, why take 50x the time to gather the science needed for that goal, when worst-case we can spend 50x the budget and just put humans there to incidentally also gather knowledge on how to live in space.
Thing is: Building something that can autonomously navigate the many many variables of city traffic without killing people in the process, is a whole different problem space than building something that can stick a scientific instrument into the ground in an empty rock-desert.
> the humans surveyed more ground
Again: Scientific progress is not measured in "kilometers driven". And what "surveying" were they doing exactly? How many experiments did they perform during these runs? How many Terabytes of Data did these excursions produce per kilometer driven?
I don't know the number tbh. but I am willing to bet that the Mars rovers did better. ALOT better.
But okay, if you want to measure distance, lets:
Perseverance (which is still active btw.) covered 25.113 km so far. The Ingenuity drone (which perseverance carried), covered a total of 17.242 km.
So that's a grand total (so far, again, Perseverance is still active) of 42.355 km.
The longest LRV drive was LVR-3 on Apollo 17: 35.89 km. And, let's be clear: That is the total of all its excursions, not a single drive.
So yeah, sorry, but the robots have also out-distanced humans already. Comfortably so.
> Ultimately we're going to colonize space
No, we're not, until such time as we figure out how to leave the solar system and travel to other Earth-like planets.
That seems unfair and unsatisfying, I know, but there is simply no way around the facts: other than Earth, every single place in the solar system that doesn't just outright kill humans the moment they leave the spacecraft (and quite a few would kill people instantly even before that), is less hospitable than Earth would be during an ice age, or after a nuclear war.
Also note that even with the limitations, the humans surveyed more ground. Remove the limitation by making the rover a mobile habitat and now the humans can have an even more expansive and productive mission.
Ultimately we're going to colonize space, why take 50x the time to gather the science needed for that goal, when worst-case we can spend 50x the budget and just put humans there to incidentally also gather knowledge on how to live in space.