Generative AI Gives Spacecraft the Autonomy Engineers Once Feared

Key points

• Space was always supposed to be the final frontier of human exploration.1
• Now, researchers are testing whether nondeterministic systems like generative AI can give spacecraft more flexibility to interpret their surroundings, plan tasks, and one day make decisions for themselves.1
• Spacecraft have been operating autonomously for decades.1
• “Autonomy often does not have a deterministic outcome, which means that how you got into a certain situation changes the behavior,” says Robert Ambrose, the former chief of NASA’s Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division. “So if you come into the same situation but from different paths, the outcome could be different.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Generative AI Gives Spacecraft the Autonomy Engineers Once Feared
  IEEE Spectrum: AI · Sep 28, 11:00 AM

  Last December, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used Anthropic’s Claude models to help plan two Mars drives for the Perseverance rover, with human planners checking and adjusting the route before upload.

  Space was always supposed to be the final frontier of human exploration.

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