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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 15 2020, @04:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the sol-day-drivers dept.

One of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory teams is asking for help training an AI to drive Mars rovers

You may be able to help NASA's Curiosity rover drivers better navigate Mars. Using the online tool AI4Mars to label terrain features in pictures downloaded from the Red Planet, you can train an artificial intelligence algorithm to automatically read the landscape.

Is that a big rock to the left? Could it be sand? Or maybe it's nice, flat bedrock. AI4Mars, which is hosted on the citizen science website Zooniverse, lets you draw boundaries around terrain and choose one of four labels. Those labels are key to sharpening the Martian terrain-classification algorithm called SPOC (Soil Property and Object Classification).

The goal is to have the AI be able to autonomously avoid pitfalls such as caused Spirit to get stuck and end its mission after seven years of exploration.

"In the future, we hope this algorithm can become accurate enough to do other useful tasks, like predicting how likely a rover's wheels are to slip on different surfaces," [Hiro Ono, an AI researcher at JPL] said.

In the tool, you will view terrain images from Mars rovers, draw polygons around sections of them and assess them as Sand, Consolidated Soil, Bedrock, and Big Rocks.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @07:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @07:58PM (#1008293)

    Q23- Is it a deep crevice or black sand?
    97% of answers submitted said black sand resulting in the rover going full speed ahead.