NEW YORK: A new autonomous underwater vehicle (UAV) from researchers at MIT will help researchers on Earth explore the oceans, survey marine habitats and check on the health of species. It may also help scientists at NASA explore the solar system. The UAV uses artificial intelligence to set priorities, adapt to circumstances and execute minor repairs and maintenance.
Currently engineers spend a great deal of time writing scripts and low-level commands that tell a robot, step-by-step, how to carry out a mission. The new system asks humans for high-level goals and the robot then performs high-level decision making, while monitoring circumstances, to decide how best to achieve the goals it is tasked with.
Brian Williams, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and principal developer of the mission-planning system said that the system is loosely based on Star Trek. In the hierarchy of programs running the UAV, there is a “captain” which makes higher level decisions, plans missions and decides where to go and when. There is a “navigator” that selects the best route to meet the goals of the mission and a “doctor” or “engineer” that does diagnostics and repairs.
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