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IBM-Cimon

When ane considers the types of equipment shipped up to the International Space Station, there's a certain listing of default equipment that makes sense. Spare parts? Check. Food and medical supplies? Check. Some fashion of amusement options? Check. Eleven-pound robot head? Not and then much. Just IBM has visions of how such hardware might be useful, and information technology's developed such a device — the Coiffure Interactive Mobile Companion (CIMON for short).

Meet Wilson, Watson, Cimon

Cimon is technically powered by what IBM calls "Watson" technology, but information technology has a unique mission on the ISS. Information technology volition piece of work with German astronaut Alexander Gerst to run some crystal experiments, solve a Rubik's Cube, and conduct a "complex medical experiment" using Cimon equally a flying camera.

All of this sounds fairly rote, but some of the other functions are more than interesting. Cimon is as well intended to serve as a colleague to on-board astronauts, including working through prescribed checklists in coordination with its "teammates." There's also talk of Cimon beingness able to serve as a safety-improvement by giving warnings of impending failures before astronauts might see them on a control board.

Hither's how IBM describes Cimon's ability to learn:

AI gives the space assistant text, speech and paradigm processing capabilities, also equally the ability to retrieve specific data and findings. These skills, which tin can be trained individually and deepened in the context of a given consignment, are developed based on the principle of understanding – reasoning – learning.

Watson speech communication and vision technologies helped train CIMON to recognize Alexander Gerst, using voice samples and Gerst, as well as "non-Gerst" images. Information technology too used the Watson Visual Recognition service to learn the construction plans of the Columbus module on the International Space Station to exist able to easily move around. CIMON also learned all the procedures to aid carrying out the on-lath experiments. Experiments sometimes consist of more than 100 different steps, CIMON knows them all.

Cimon is a long way off from demonstrating what experts refer to as "strong" AI — progress in that field hasn't really budged, despite the widespread adoption of AI as a marketing term — but there's real potential for accelerate here, nosotros call up.

One surface area where AI advances could truly revolutionize human capabilities is in the exploration of the solar arrangement. Human exploration of objects beyond the moon is a difficult problem for many reasons, just the demand to protect and preserve human life across an interplanetary journey ranging from months to years is 1 of the most significant issues. Most of NASA's greatest exploration breakthroughs have been delivered past satellites and rovers controlled from Earth, but these systems take clear limits. Communications take to traverse at to the lowest degree iii "hops," showtime from the vehicle to Earth, and so from Earth to the vehicle, and so from the vehicle to World again before NASA or one of the other infinite agencies knows that a specific action has completed successfully.

Cimon-Artist-Depiction

The idea of a rover or satellite every bit intelligent as, say, R2-D2, is withal entirely inside the realm of science fiction. But information technology's not crazy to imagine a successor to Marvel that'south equipped with the sensors and tools it needs to reach its own conclusions about which rock faces might be optimal for drilling, or which patches of ground might yield revealing soil samples. Initially, of course, these conclusions would be checked and triple-checked past scientists on the ground. But over time, as the probe proved itself, it might be possible to support the mission with fewer personnel, allowing for other projects to be pursued.

Meanwhile, the inevitable adjustments fabricated to each probe once it began its exploration could be folded back into improvements to future probes. While some improvements would manifestly be mission-specific, changes to instrument data integration or cadre adjustments to heave reliability and stability over the long term could drive a virtuous bike over time.

That's an awful lot of weight to put on the initial deployment of a single robot head, just information technology's not a crazy idea. Maybe in 15-twenty years we'll be fielding space probes with self-directed exploration capabilities, accompanied by pocket-sized human oversight.