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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @05:11PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @05:11PM (#1008202)

    Teach it to go outside, or on the paper

    Only feed it once a day

    Never talk to the police

    Never consent to a search

    Always ask for a lawyer

    Always comply

    Stop resisting!

    • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Monday June 15 2020, @05:14PM

      by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 15 2020, @05:14PM (#1008205) Journal

      The cold should help a bit with that last one.

      --
      В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @06:27PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @06:27PM (#1008245)

    With this kind of training, it will never learn to recognize aliens... it'll end up classifying them as big boring rocks and drive away!

    • (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.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday June 15 2020, @07:16PM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Monday June 15 2020, @07:16PM (#1008269)

    Any room for trolling the rover? If there is someone, or many, will do it just to see the rover fly off a cliff or whatnot.

    They couldn't find something on K to make the name SPOCK? Or was that copyrighted?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @10:52AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @10:52AM (#1008527)

      They couldn't find something on K to make the name SPOCK?

      They hope for something different than Kamikaze.

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