andy%aids-unix@sri-unix.UUCP (07/13/83)
From: Andy Cromarty <andy@aids-unix> First: Thanks to all who have responded to my initial note about rovers. Most people seem to have taken what I would regard as the easy (and commensurately uninteresting) way out by choosing a lunar environment, precisely because teleoperation is feasible there, if a nuisance. But what about systems operating on more distant heavenly bodies or in deep space? Even robotic vehicles on Mars would suffer rather severe performance degradation if they had to rely upon an (approximately) earth-bound intelligence for control. (A friend provides the following simple gedankenexperiment: decide now to start scratching-your-leg-until- it-stops-itching twenty minutes from now; now wait twenty minutes before you can start; then, perhaps, wait at least twenty minutes before you can consider stopping....) Note that I'm not taking issue with the desirability of teleoperated lunar vehicles. (In fact, there's good reason to believe that a planetary or lunar rover is politically unrealistic if NASA has anything to say about it, given what I understand to be the prevailing NASA attitude towards *unmanned* space exploration, but that fact doesn't motivate my comments here.) Rather, I'm suggesting we tackle a problem domain sufficiently rich in AI problems to (a) keep things interesting and (b) allow us to explore what contribution, if any, we might be able to make as computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers. Do we know enough to solve, or even identify, the difficult issues in situation assessment, planning, and resource allocation faced by such a system? For example, reinterpreting Professor Minsky's desire that "anyone with such budgets should aim them at AI education and research fellowships", let us then assume that these fellowships are provided by NASA and have a problem domain specified: perhaps, for example, we might choose a space station orbiting Mars as our testing grounds, with robot assembly prior to arrival of humans on-site as the problem. What problems can we already solve, and where is the research needed? asc