Space News by Debra Werner — August 15, 2017
Mars 2020 is an ambitious mission. NASA plans to gather 20 rock cores and soil samples within 1.25 Mars years, or about 28 Earth months — a task that would be impossible without artificial intelligence because the rover would waste too much time waiting for instructions.
It currently takes the Mars Science Laboratory team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory eight hours to plan daily activities for the Curiosity rover before sending instructions through NASA’s over-subscribed Deep Space Network. Program managers tell the rover when to wake up, how long to warm up its instruments and how to steer clear of rocks that damage its already beat-up wheels.
Mars 2020 will need far more autonomy. “Missions are paced by the number of times the ground is in the loop,” said Jennifer Trosper, Mars Science Laboratory mission manager. “The more the rover can do on its own, the more it can get done.”
The $2.4 billion Mars 2020 mission is just one example of NASA’s increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, although the term itself makes some people uneasy. Many NASA scientists and engineers prefer to talk about machine learning and autonomy rather than artificial intelligence, a broad term that in the space community sometimes evokes images of HAL 9000, the fictional computer introduced in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To be clear, NASA is not trying to create HAL. Instead, engineers are developing software and algorithms to meet the specific requirements of missions.
“Work we are doing today focuses not so much on general intelligence but on trying to allow systems to be more independent, more self-reliant, more autonomous,” said Kelly Fong, the NASA Ames Research Center’s senior scientist for autonomous systems and director of the Intelligent Robotics Group.
For human spaceflight, that means giving astronauts software to help them respond to unexpected events ranging from equipment failure to medical emergencies. A medical support tool, for example, combines data mining with reasoning and learning algorithms to help astronauts on multi-month missions to Mars handle everything from routine care to ailments or injuries “without having to talk to a roomful of flight controllers shadowing them all the time,” Fong said.
Through robotic Mars missions, NASA is demonstrating increasingly capable rovers. NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, could do very little on their own when they bounced onto the red planet in 2004, although they have gained some autonomy through software upgrades. Curiosity, by comparison, is far more capable.
Last year, Curiosity began using software called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science that combines computer vision with machine learning to select rocks and soil samples to investigate based on criteria determined by scientists. The rover can zap targets with its ChemCam laser, analyze the gases that burn off, package the data with images and send them to Earth.
More:
http://spacenews.com/beyond-hal-how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-space-systems/
