Highly Autonomous Systems Workshop

Researchers and technology developers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), other government agencies, academia, and industry recently met in Pasadena, California, to take stock of past and current work and future challenges in the application of AI to highly autonomous systems. In our lifetime, through the eyes of simple robots, grand vistas on other worlds have been unveiled for the first time. Enigmatic questions compel us to go further, to touch these distant landscapes and learn the secrets of the solar system. However, in trying, we find our reach wanting, limited by the link to Earth on which our probes depend. We are learning that to explore further, these probes must go alone, and to go alone, they must become much more intelligent.