In the current situation if you are lost or just can’t find the right direction to a desired place in a new city, you open Yandex.Maps, Google Maps or any other mapping application based on GPS and by following a few tips find the right route. Unfortunately, in space, that luxury you don’t have. For example, if you lost on the moon or on the way to Mars, then most likely you end. Experts from Frontier Development Lab (division of NASA) in collaboration with engineers from Intel are developing a solution for this problem.
The researchers found an easy way to navigate to other planets in the Solar system, but the method requires an artificial intelligence. His vision of interplanetary navigation they presented at the event organized by Intel.
GPS (Global Positioning System) is global positioning system. It is a satellite navigation system that provides measurement of distance, time and identifies the location in world coordinate system. The satellites calculate your location and transmit information to the app of your mobile device, giving a hint in the right direction, for example, the newly opened restaurant. A very handy thing. One problem – it only works on the Ground.
Because setting up a similar satellite systems around other celestial bodies within the Solar system seems unrealistically complicated and expensive prospect, NASA and Intel decided to develop a method planetary navigation system.
According to the developers, if you “feed” the AI a huge number of images of the surface of the cosmic body, to determine the position of man in this cosmic body of artificial intelligence will allow the environment in which the person will be. On this basis, the system will be able to pave the right route to a particular destination.
For testing of the technology, researchers from Frontier Development Lab and Intel have created a virtual moon. Digital satellite was established on the basis of 2.4 million artificial surface images of the moon, what she’d seen from the camera of the Rover, if that was on the surface. Then take off the AI showed that the folding of all the images brought a General picture of the virtual satellite. In the framework of the presentation the technology of satellite positioning showed a fairly high level of efficiency and accuracy for navigation.
In the future, the developers want to do the same, but with real, not virtual space-body – Mars. According to experts, they have a sufficient number of satellite images of the planet’s surface to create a quite effective GPS navigation. If this is true, then the first Martian colonists will not get lost on the red planet. To find the necessary direction they need to just take a photo of the surrounding area, and the system can quickly find them.
NASA creates space GPS navigation based on artificial intelligence
Nikolai Khizhnyak