Minsky%MIT-OZ@sri-unix.UUCP (06/15/83)
On Lunar Rover. If I had 500K/year for research on a lunar rover, I wouldn't spend any of it on AI or automatic obstacle avoidance, etc. at all. I would spend all of it on developing a good remote, all-purpose Rover vehicle, to be controlled through a 2-1/2 second delay system. I would de-bug in in suitable local environments, e.g., staring in the Mohave or somewhere nice like that. We'd see how often the delay causes accidents; the top design speed would be perhaps 0.2 meters/second so that most contingencies couldb be handled in human reaction times. Once we know the accident rate we take two tacks. First, simple automatic probes that measure the terrain a meter ahead of the beast so that it won't fall into crevasses that the operator missed or was too careless to avoid. This simple "AI" work would then lead to increasing concervative reliability. The other tack would be mechanical escape devices. For example, the standard operation might be to use a retractable anchor that is hooked to the terrain before advancing each 100 meters. Then its prongs are retracted and it is pulled back to the Rover and reimplanted. This would permit using a winch to get out of troubles. It might not save the day if a landslide partly buries the Rover, though. A more advance system would have TWO Rovers roped together, like climbers, each with good manipulator capability. (Climbers prefer three.) That could be enough to get out of most problems. All this would lead to a Rover that can traverse about a kilometer/day. A few of them could explore a lot of moon in a few years. The project would stimulate some AI for use on Mars and other places. But I think that over the next 3-5 years, the fewer new AI projects the better, in some ways, and anyone with such budgets should aim them at AI education and research fellowships.