NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars 

The six-wheeled scientist’s team used vision-capable AI to create a safe route above the surface of the Red Planet without the intervention of human route planners.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has made the first trips to another world planned by artificial intelligence. Executed Dec. 8 and 10 and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by planners on the mission’s human rover.

“This demonstration shows how far our capabilities have advanced and expands how we will explore other worlds,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Autonomous technologies like this can help missions operate more efficiently, respond to challenging terrain, and increase science outputs as the distance from Earth increases. This is a good example of teams applying new technologies carefully and responsibly in real-world operations.”

During the demonstration, the team leveraged a type of generative AI called vision language models to analyze existing data from JPL’s surface mission dataset. The AI ​​used the same images and data that human planners rely on to generate waypoints – fixed locations where the rover takes a new set of instructions – so Perseverance can safely navigate the difficult Martian terrain.

The initiative was led from JPL’s Rover Operations Center (ROC) in collaboration with Anthropic, using the company’s Claude AI models.

Mars is on average about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) from Earth. This large distance creates a significant communication lag, making real-time remote operation – or “joystick” – of a rover impossible. Over the past 28 years, on several missions, rovers’ routes have been planned and executed by human “drivers” who analyze terrain and state data to plot a route using waypoints, which are typically no more than 330 feet (100 meters) apart to avoid potential danger. Then they send the plans via NASA’s Deep Space Network to the rover, which executes them.

But for Perseverance’s journeys during the 1,707 and 1,709 Martian days or sols of the mission, the team did something different: Generative AI provided analysis of high-resolution orbital imagery from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and terrain slope data from digital elevation models. After identifying critical terrain features – bedrock, outcrops, hazardous boulder fields, sand undulations, etc. – it generated a complete continuous path with waypoints.

To ensure the AI ​​instructions were fully compatible with the rover’s flight software, the engineering team also processed driving commands through JPL’s “digital twin” (virtual replica of the rover), checking more than 500,000 telemetry variables before sending commands to Mars.

On December 8, with generative AI waypoints in memory, Perseverance traveled 689 feet (210 meters). Two days later, he traveled 807 feet (246 meters).

“The fundamental elements of generative AI hold great promise in streamlining the pillars of autonomous navigation for off-planet driving: perception (seeing rocks and ripples), localization (knowing where we are), and planning and control (deciding and executing the safest path),” said Vandi Verma, a space roboticist at JPL and a member of the Perseverance engineering team. “We are moving toward a day when generative AI and other intelligent tools will help our surface rovers manage kilometer-scale journeys while minimizing operator workload, and flag surface features of interest to our science team by combing through huge volumes of rover images.”

“Imagine intelligent systems not only on the ground on Earth, but also in cutting-edge applications in our rovers, helicopters, drones and other surface elements formed with the collective wisdom of our NASA engineers, scientists and astronauts,” said Matt Wallace, director of JPL’s Office of Exploration Systems. “This is the revolutionary technology we need to establish the infrastructure and systems necessary for a permanent human presence on the Moon and take the United States to Mars and beyond.”

Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL is home to the Rover Operations Center (ROC). She also manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.

For more information about the ROC, visit:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/roc

Contacts with news media

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

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