ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN SPACE EXPLORATION

Overview 

Space Exploration has always been a keen interest of scientist and governments all over the world as it hold the key to our origin and existence. The visible universe represents the parts of space that we can see using telescopes yet we all believe that the universe is much more larger than that.

To date scientist have explored roughly only 4% of the visible universe remaining is still left to be explored.

What is Artificial Intelligence

The term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined decades ago in the year 1956 by John McCarty at the Dartmouth Conference. He defined artificial intelligence as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. In a sense AI is a technique of getting machines to work and behave like humans.

Machine learning is a specialized branch in the AI domain that deals with training machines to develop intelligence that can enable them to do complex tasks by using their intelligence. Machine learning algorithms use tons of data to help machines get familiar with diverse scenarios that they can face. It enables machines to learn from their training experience and use them in real-life scenarios.

Now if we were to combine the ideas of these two massive terms namely AI and Space Exploration, keeping in mind the recent developments in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, imagine how easy it would be for scientists and explorers to achieve their goal and how it would affect our lives.

Let us see what all have been created ,what is in progress and what can be done in future.

   1)  AI-Based Assistants and Robots

                                                    CASE from “”Interstellar”

Do the names TARS and CASE ring any bells? Yes, I am talking about the robots from the very famous movie ‘Interstellar’ (and in case you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend you do). If you remember the role of TARS and CASE in the movie, imagine how useful they would be in assisting the astronauts in real life.

Scientists are developing AI-based assistants to aid astronauts in their mission to Moon, Mars, and beyond. These assistants are designed to understand and predict the requirements of the crew and comprehend astronauts’ emotions and their mental health and take necessary actions in the case of an emergency. Now how do they do that? The answer to this is sentiment analysis. Sentiment Analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is a sub-field of NLP (Natural Language Processing) that tries to identify and extract opinions within a given text across blogs, reviews, social media, forums, news, etc.

Robots, on the other hand, can come in more handy when it comes to physical assistants like helping in piloting spacecraft, docking spacecraft, and handling extreme conditions that are not safe to humans. Most of it may sound hypothetical, but it will prove to be a lot of help to astronauts.

CIMON, the AI-powered robot, launches a new era in space travel

CIMON–the AI-powered crew companion 

Airbus reached out to IBM, whose IBM Watson AI technology could be trained on any number of experiments and scientific areas, and to the German Aerospace Center, which provides funding by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) and support for innovative space exploration projects.

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Together, Airbus, the German Aerospace Center DLR and IBM launched the technology-demonstration Project CIMON—Crew Interactive Mobile Companion—the first AI-powered robot in space. CIMON is a free-floating, sphere-shaped interactive companion that can assist the astronauts in their daily work. CIMON, created using 3D printing technology, weighs approximately 11 pounds (5 kilograms), and has a screen that displays a face with human-like expressions as the astronauts communicate with it.

CIMON can be trained on the tasks and experiments of a mission and responds to voice questions or directions without the need for a tablet or computer, which leaves the astronaut’s hands free to conduct experiments without pausing to type or search. CIMON can also help an astronaut resume a paused task, remembering exactly where they left off. Because the crew knows that they can ask for assistance and receive an answer quickly. In the future, CIMON could help increasing crew productivity while reducing stress.

To be continued..

Next innovation in next blog.