Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Mars Journey

NASA has released details of a test it conducted in December in which it used generative AI to plan a route for the Perseverance rover. The test run seems to have gone rather well, prompting NASA to evaluate how it explores other planetary bodies in the future.

The major problem facing any robotic exploration of a planet's surface is communication delay. Even though Mars is one of our planet's closest neighbors, it's still about 140 million miles away (on average), making real-time messaging impossible. Sending a single message in each direction takes about 12.5 minutes, for a 25-minute round-trip. Traditionally, that means rover routes are planned by humans in advance, analyzing rover status data and terrain maps to make the best possible guess about the route to take.

With this large language model (LLM), strong image and pattern recognition enable it to map effective routes for ...