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A.I. space travel

Eavesdropper
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Spacecraft and rockets with no personnel onboard  are controlled by people on the earth's surface. There is one major issue with this arrangement, time to action responses. When a rocket's onboard sensors discover an error, it relays the information back to earth and operators from there figure a way to handle the situation. The further the craft sits from earth, the longer it takes to handle a problem.
 
 
The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at JAXA seek to eliminate the delay by creating an artificial intelligence to handle much of a space vehicle's operations. The rocket, called Epsilon, will be able to diagnose issues, make repairs, provide and implement solutions. The Epsilon will make its first space flight in 2013.
 
 
I was under the idea that there was something like this already in place, some sort of error checking and correcting on board. This new knowledge makes space travel look a little less high tech. See more at the JAXA Site.
 
 
Eavesdropper

  • Many years ago, I was involved in a project where we were looking at building autonomous simulation players.  You can see some of our early work now being used in many computer games and computer generated characters.

    The Japanese effort is ambitious, but not beyond the capabilities of these same attributes.  There are a number of situations that can be programmed into the AI to deal with those events that require immediate, ie survival, events, and those events which require a human in the loop response.

    Hopefully, the Japanese will share the data they come up with when they reach the point where they think they have a functioning AI.  Given the need for autonomous robots and vehicles, there should be plenty of domestic earth bound applications for which they can test out their approaches.

    I wish them luck.

    DAB