Researchers develop new approach for conducting automated science in space

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Researchers have developed a new approach to balancing the risks and scientific value of sending planetary rovers into dangerous situations.

Researchers in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute (RI) have developed a new approach to balancing the risks and scientific value of sending planetary rovers into dangerous situations.

David Wettergreen, a research professor in the RI, and Alberto Candela, who earned his Ph.D. in robotics and is now a data scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will present their work, "An Approach to Science and Risk-Aware Planetary Rover Exploration," at the IEEE and RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems later this month in Kyoto, Japan.

"We looked at how to balance the risk associated with going to challenging places against the value of what you might discover there," said Wettergreen, who has worked on autonomous planetary exploration for decades at Carnegie Mellon University. "This is the next step in autonomous navigation and to producing more and better data to aid scientists."

For their approach, Wettergreen and Candela combined a model used to estimate science value with a model that estimates risk. Science value is estimated using the robot's confidence in its interpretation of the mineral composition of rocks. If the robot believes it has identified rocks correctly without needing additional measurements, it may choose to explore somewhere new. If the robot's confidence is low, however, it may decide to continue to study the current area and improve its mineralogical model. Zoe, a rover that for decades has tested technologies for autonomy, used a previous version of this model during experiments in 2019 in the Nevada desert.

The researchers