NASA taps Claude to conjure Mars rover's travel plan

Anthropic's Claude machine learning model has boldly planned what no Claude has planned before – a path across Mars for NASA's Perseverance rover.

Perseverance traveled about 400 meters on the Martian surface last month based on an AI-generated path. It did so with the blessing of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who decided to delegate the meticulous work of route planning to Anthropic's AI model.

As Anthropic explains in its writeup of the milestone, the surface of Mars can be treacherous for rovers. No one wants to be responsible for getting pricey space kit stuck in the sand, as happened with the Spirit rover in 2009.

So the Perseverance team spends a fair amount of time on route planning. This involves consulting orbital and surface imagery of Mars in order to set a series of waypoints to guide the rover's movements. Once plotted, this ...