NASA Boosts AI For Planetary Rovers

transcendent writes "According to Space Daily, NASA is working on increasing the ability of future rover's AI. From the article: 'It now takes the human-robot teams on two worlds several days to achieve each of many individual objectives... A robot equipped with AI, on the other hand, could make an evaluation on the spot, achieve its mission faster and explore more'. Sounds like a good idea, but the article continues, 'Today's technology can make a rover as smart as a cockroach, but the problem is it's an unproven technology'. Another article about autonomous rovers being developed by Carnegie Mellon University is here."

Comments

I can see it now....

[fatgeekuk]

Radio contact broken when the rover hides under a rock...

Re:I can see it now....

[nofx_3]

While the parent was modded funny, this could be a serious issue with so-called AI. Imagine a tiny unforseen deviation between the expected result of the robots reactions, and its actual reactions to an alien environment. This could cuase the rover to do any number of unwanted things. The truth of the matter is that no matter how much the AI is tested on earth, the whole point of the rover is to explore an alien world, and in doing so we don't know exactly what the rover will find, so to let a multi-million/billon dollar rover make its own decisions on how to handle a situation could cause some serious problems. For instance image a rover missinterprets a hole in the ground as a shadow from a rock and considers it safe to drive through, you can kiss the rover goodbye. I think for now, having an actual human interpreting what the rover see's before it moves makes a lot more sense when we are dealing with such great distances and costs.
-kaplanfx

Re:I can see it now....

[jarda]

Well, the trick is not to rely on just one type of sensor - actually, there are pretty good sensors out there for mapping terrain directly in front of robot. And that article talks about 10 years pespective, it's not like their planning to use the technology tomorrow.

Besides, as I mentioned in other post, as we start exploring places farther from the Earth, communication lag will start to get much bigger problem, until finally you'll either have to send humans or AI. And I bet AI, even with some risks associated. will be considerably cheaper, so it's better to plan ahead.

What it should say...

[BubbaThePirate]

'It now takes the human-robot teams on two worlds several days to achieve each of many individual objectives... A robot equipped with AI, on the other hand, could make an evaluation on the spot, achieve its mission faster and kill off the remaining crew members with higher efficiency.'

Re:Obey

[Konstantinos]

1. A robot may not injure a cockroach or, through inaction allow a cockroach to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by cockroaches except when such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Scary...

Hold your horses!

[ControlFreal]

I do a Ph.D. in an AI-related field at the moment, and all I can say is: Don't hold your breath. While it is true that AI has made significant progress, a few remarks are in order.

First, the "I" in AI really shouldn't be there. When people talk a diffucult decision problem (e.g. some pattern recognition problem), there comes the point where somebody will say, with a solemn voice: "So, what if we use Neural Networks?" (you can practically hear him pronounce those capitals, while he's creaming his pants at the mere thought of his new awsome intelligent system). People often assume that, because a neural network is a very simple and poor analogy of the brain, that it must have some "intelligence".

Guess what? A neural network is a simple nonlinear function. Period. Training such a thing is nothing more than estimating its parameters by minimizing some (usually quadratic) cost criterion. When you put something in, you merely evaluate a rather simple nonlinear function. There is no intelligence involved!

And then people say: "Yeah, but we have different things as well, such as clustering methods, radial basis function networks, Bayesian (belief) networks, support vector machines, evolutionary algorithms, etc,". They too, do nothing more than estimating parameters (of selecting representative examples) based on the statistics of the problem at hand.

There is a good reason for the fact that "AI" researchers themselves often refer to their field as "machine learning", rather than AI. If anything, I'd call AI "AS", for Applied Statistics, because most of the methods we use are either pure of augmented statistics.

That said, machine learning has achieved some nice things. We can do some simple decision-making, pattern recognition (e.g. face detection) and emulate some limited insect behaviour. There even are some limited commercial applications. But we should be very aware of the fact that most "spectacular" results are merely lab results. I work on face detection myself, and I can tell you that "the real world" (natural photos for me) is a bitch as far as applying methods is concerned.

Looks more like Weak AI ...

[foobsr]

"Creating strong AI software is a very exciting and challenging problem, and it inspires us and our students to work on this bold effort," said noted artificial intelligence expert professor Milind Tambe of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked with Rajan."

I very much doubt that they are talking about strong AI there. ( Arguments for Strong AI).

I rather believe he is more on the weak side.

But, well, he is a noted expert.

CC.

def. The two main varieties of AI are called "strong" and "weak". Strong AI argues that it is possible that one day a computer will be invented which can be called a mind in the fullest sense of the word. In other words, it can think, reason, imagine, etc., and do all the things that we currently associate with the human brain. Weak AI, on the other hand, argues that computers can only appear to think and are not actually conscious in the same way as human brains are.

loc. cit.