NASA Autonomy Incubator Pushing for Intelligent Machines

(Source: pddnet.com)  

They’re all things people do well. But the day could soon come when intelligent machines do them even better.

That’s the thinking, anyway, among a small group of multi-disciplinary scientists, engineers and student interns at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

That group, known as the Autonomy Incubator, is taking purposeful strides to, as group leader Danette Allen puts it, “imbue machines with the kind of intelligence that we expect from human beings.”

If that sounds like a monumental task, it is. When the Autonomy Incubator completes what will likely be a three-year run, it won’t have jumped all the tall hurdles that stand between machines and human intelligence. This is, after all, a field of research that, in many ways, is still in its infancy.

NASA has a definite need for autonomous systems, though — in aeronautics, space exploration and Earth science. And Allen and her cohorts believe the research they’re doing could lay the groundwork for a future in which NASA can safely and reliably fulfill that need.

Creating the Incubator

Allen, who has a broad range of experience in space, aeronautics, science and engineering for aerospace flight systems set the research and development focus for the Autonomy Incubator a few years ago when, she says, center leaders were “casting forward into the future, trying to determine what kind of capabilities, technologies we would need.”

They asked Allen to spend about six months investigating the burgeoning field of autonomy. They wanted her to “get a real understanding of what was happening outside, look under the hood of all these videos you see on the web, find out what the real state of the art was.”

Some of the areas Allen quickly realized would benefit from autonomous systems were deep space exploration, as well as unmanned and personal air vehicles.

In order to help prepare Mars for the arrival of humans, NASA will need systems that can avoid obstacles and detect the difference between shadows and craters while exploring the Martian surface.

And in order to make possible a future in which unmanned and personal air vehicles can safely fly the nation’s skyways, engineers must design systems that will allow the air vehicles themselves to handle some of the complex decision making of flight.

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