31.08.

2020 Deep learn ng w ll help future Mars rovers go farther, faster, and do more sc ence -- Sc enceDa ly

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Deep learn ng w ll help future Mars rovers go farther, faster, and
do more sc ence
Date: August 19, 2020

Source: Un vers ty of Texas at Aust n, Texas Advanced Comput ng Center

Summary: NASA JPL are develop ng autonomous capab l t es that could allow future Mars rovers to go
farther, faster and do more sc ence. Tra n ng mach ne learn ng models on the Maver ck2, the r
team developed and opt m zed models for Dr ve-By Sc ence and Energy-Opt mal Autonomous
Nav gat on.

FULL STORY

NASA's Mars rovers have been one of the great sc ent f c and space successes of the
past two decades.
evocative-andıran,çağrıştıran
Four generat ons of rovers have traversed the red planet gather ng sc ent f c data, send ng back evocat ve
photographs, and surv v ng ncred bly harsh cond t ons -- all us ng on-board computers less powerful than an
tahammül
Phone 1. The latest rover, Perseverance, was launched on July 30, 2020, and eng neers are already dream ng
of a future generat on of rovers.
çizilmiş
Wh le a major ach evement, these m ss ons have only scratched the surface (l terally and f gurat vely) of the
planet and ts geology, geography, and atmosphere.

"The surface area of Mars s approx mately the same as the total area of the land on Earth," sa d Masah ro
(H ro) Ono, group lead of the Robot c Surface Mob l ty Group at the NASA Jet Propuls on Laboratory (JPL) --
wh ch has led all the Mars rover m ss ons -- and one of the researchers who developed the software that
allows the current rover to operate.

"Imag ne, you're an al en and you know almost noth ng about Earth, and you land on seven or e ght po nts on
Earth and dr ve a few hundred k lometers. Does that al en spec es know enough about Earth?" Ono asked.
"No. If we want to represent the huge d vers ty of Mars we'll need more measurements on the ground, and the
key s substant ally extended d stance, hopefully cover ng thousands of m les."
tehlikeli
Travell ng across Mars' d verse, treacherous terra n w th l m ted comput ng power and a restr cted energy d et -
- only as much sun as the rover can capture and convert to power n a s ngle Mart an day, or sol -- s a huge
challenge.

The f rst rover, Sojourner, covered 330 feet over 91 sols; the second, Sp r t, travelled 4.8 m les n about f ve
years; Opportun ty, travelled 28 m les over 15 years; and Cur os ty has travelled more than 12 m les s nce t
landed n 2012.

"Our team s work ng on Mars robot autonomy to make future rovers more ntell gent, to enhance safety, to
mprove product v ty, and n part cular to dr ve faster and farther," Ono sa d.

NEW HARDWARE, NEW POSSIBILITIES

radrasyonla sertleştirilmiş
The Perseverance rover, wh ch launched th s summer, computes us ng RAD 750s -- rad at on-hardened s ngle
board computers manufactured by BAE Systems Electron cs.

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31.08.2020 Deep learn ng w ll help future Mars rovers go farther, faster, and do more sc ence -- Sc enceDa ly

Future m ss ons, however, would potent ally use new h gh-performance, mult -core rad at on hardened
processors des gned through the H gh Performance Spacefl ght Comput ng (HPSC) project. (Qualcomm's
Snapdragon processor s also be ng tested for m ss ons.) These ch ps w ll prov de about one hundred t mes
the computat onal capac ty of current fl ght processors us ng the same amount of power.

"All of the autonomy that you see on our latest Mars rover s largely human- n-the-loop" -- mean ng t requ res
vekil
human nteract on to operate, accord ng to Chr s Mattmann, the deputy ch ef technology and nnovat on off cer
at JPL. "Part of the reason for that s the l m ts of the processors that are runn ng on them. One of the core
geçici,karasal
m ss ons for these new ch ps s to do deep learn ng and mach ne learn ng, l ke we do terrestr ally, on board.
What are the k ller apps g ven that new comput ng env ronment?"

The Mach ne Learn ng-based Analyt cs for Autonomous Rover Systems (MAARS) program -- wh ch started
sonuçlanmak kapsamak
three years ago and w ll conclude th s year -- encompasses a range of areas where art f c al ntell gence could
be useful. The team presented results of the MAARS project at hIEEE Aerospace Conference n March 2020.
The project was a f nal st for the NASA Software Award.

"Terrestr al h gh performance comput ng has enabled ncred ble breakthroughs n autonomous veh cle
nav gat on, mach ne learn ng, and data analys s for Earth-based appl cat ons," the team wrote n the r IEEE
barikat
paper. "The ma n roadblock to a Mars explorat on rollout of such advances s that the best computers are on
Earth, wh le the most valuable data s located on Mars."

Tra n ng mach ne learn ng models on the Maver ck2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Comput ng Center
(TACC), as well as on Amazon Web Serv ces and JPL clusters, Ono, Mattmann and the r team have been
develop ng two novel capab l t es for future Mars rovers, wh ch they call Dr ve-By Sc ence and Energy-Opt mal
Autonomous Nav gat on.

ENERGY-OPTIMAL AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION

Ono was part of the team that wrote the on-board pathf nd ng software for Perseverance. Perseverance's
kaşif sade,çaylak
software ncludes some mach ne learn ng ab l t es, but the way t does pathf nd ng s st ll fa rly naïve.

"We'd l ke future rovers to have a human-l ke ab l ty to see and understand terra n," Ono sa d. "For rovers,
önemli ölçüde
energy s very mportant. There's no paved h ghway on Mars. The dr vab l ty var es substant ally based on the
terra n -- for nstance beach versus. bedrock. That s not currently cons dered. Com ng up w th a path w th all of
these constra nts s compl cated, but that's the level of computat on that we can handle w th the HPSC or
numune
Snapdragon ch ps. But to do so we're go ng to need to change the parad gm a l ttle b t."

Ono expla ns that new parad gm as command ng by pol cy, a m ddle ground between the human-d ctated: "Go
from A to B and do C," and the purely autonomous: "Go do sc ence."

Command ng by pol cy nvolves pre-plann ng for a range of scenar os, and then allow ng the rover to determ ne
what cond t ons t s encounter ng and what t should do.

"We use a supercomputer on the ground, where we have nf n te computat onal resources l ke those at TACC,
to develop a plan where a pol cy s: f X, then do th s; f y, then do that," Ono expla ned. "We'll bas cally make a
huge to-do l st and send g gabytes of data to the rover, compress ng t n huge tables. Then we'll use the
ncreased power of the rover to de-compress the pol cy and execute t."

The pre-planned l st s generated us ng mach ne learn ng-der ved opt m zat ons. The on-board ch p can then
use those plans to perform nference: tak ng the nputs from ts env ronment and plugg ng them nto the pre-
çıkarım,sonuç
tra ned model. The nference tasks are computat onally much eas er and can be computed on a ch p l ke those
that may accompany future rovers to Mars.

"The rover has the flex b l ty of chang ng the plan on board nstead of just st ck ng to a sequence of pre-
planned opt ons," Ono sa d. "Th s s mportant n case someth ng bad happens or t f nds someth ng
nterest ng."

DRIVE-BY SCIENCE

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31.08.2020 Deep learn ng w ll help future Mars rovers go farther, faster, and do more sc ence -- Sc enceDa ly

Current Mars m ss ons typ cally use tens of mages a Sol from the rover to dec de what to do the next day,
what if-farzedelim
accord ng to Mattmann. "But what f n the future we could use one m ll on mage capt ons nstead? That's the
inanç,öğreti
core tenet of Dr ve-By Sc ence," he sa d. "If the rover can return text labels and capt ons that were sc ent f cally
val dated, our m ss on team would have a lot more to go on."

Mattmann and the team adapted Google's Show and Tell software -- a neural mage capt on generator f rst
launched n 2014 -- for the rover m ss ons, the f rst non-Google appl cat on of the technology.

The algor thm takes n mages and sp ts out human-readable capt ons. These nclude bas c, but cr t cal
en önemlilik
nformat on, l ke card nal ty -- how many rocks, how far away? -- and propert es l ke the ve n structure n
outcrops near bedrock. "The types of sc ence knowledge that we currently use mages for to dec de what's
nterest ng," Mattmann sa d.
sergilemek,şekle sokmak kısaltmalar
Over the past few years, planetary geolog sts have labeled and curated Mars-spec f c mage annotat ons to
tra n the model.

"We use the one m ll on capt ons to f nd 100 more mportant th ngs," Mattmann sa d. "Us ng search and
nformat on retr eval capab l t es, we can pr or t ze targets. Humans are st ll n the loop, but they're gett ng much
more nformat on and are able to search t a lot faster."

Results of the team's work appear n the September 2020 ssue of Planetary and Space Sc ence.

TACC's supercomputers proved nstrumental n help ng the JPL team test the system. On Maver ck 2, the team
tra ned, val dated, and mproved the r model us ng 6,700 labels created by experts.

The ab l ty to travel much farther would be a necess ty for future Mars rovers. An example s the Sample Fetch
önermek,teklif etmek
Rover, proposed to be developed by the European Space Assoc at on and launched n late 2020s, whose ma n
araştırmak
task w ll be to p ck up samples dug up by the Mars 2020 rover and collect them.

"Those rovers n a per od of years would have to dr ve 10 t mes further than prev ous rovers to collect all the
samples and to get them to a rendezvous s te," Mattmann sa d. "We'll need to be smarter about the way we
dr ve and use energy."

Before the new models and algor thms are loaded onto a rover dest ned for space, they are tested on a d rt
tra n ng ground next to JPL that serves as an Earth-based analogue for the surface of Mars.
yük
The team developed a demonstrat on that shows an overhead map, stream ng mages collected by the rover,
maruz bırakmak,açığa çıkarmak
and the algor thms runn ng l ve on the rover, and then exposes the rover do ng terra n class f cat on and
capt on ng on board. They had hoped to f n sh test ng the new system th s spr ng, but COVID-19 shuttered the
lab and delayed test ng.

In the meant me, Ono and h s team developed a c t zen sc ence app, AI4Mars, that allows the publ c to
annotate more than 20,000 mages taken by the Cur os ty rover. These w ll be used to further tra n mach ne
learn ng algor thms to dent fy and avo d hazardous terra ns.

The publ c have generated 170,000 labels so far n less than three months. "People are exc ted. It's an
opportun ty for people to help," Ono sa d. "The labels that people create w ll help us make the rover safer."

The efforts to develop a new AI-based parad gm for future autonomous m ss ons can be appl ed not just to
rovers but to any autonomous space m ss on, from orb ters to fly-bys to nterstellar probes, Ono says.

"The comb nat on of more powerful on-board comput ng power, pre-planned commands computed on h gh
performance computers l ke those at TACC, and new algor thms has the potent al to allow future rovers to
travel much further and do more sc ence."

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