NASA Used AI to Drive Its Perseverance Mars Rover for the First Time

Plotting a course for NASA's Perseverance rover, 140 million miles away on Mars, is significantly more difficult than setting a driving route here on Earth, where we can punch an address into Google Maps and be on our way in seconds. The rover's course is usually plotted by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to account for terrain, obstacles and potential hazards, lest the rover tip over or get damaged. 

For the first time, NASA's JPL used AI to plot a course for Perseverance, and it seems to have worked out. 

The two demonstrations, which took place on Dec. 8 and 10, were plotted by Anthropic's Claude AI models and double-checked by JPL to ensure that the AI ...