Fuzzy Logic, Adventures in Artificial Intelligence

Will robots ever be able to learn the way humans do? After all, gathering data about one's environment is the easy part; the difficult part is being able to evaluate that information and adjust one's response to it. Answering the call to address this highly complicated and technical question is 31-year-old Ayanna Howard (pictured left), senior member of the Telerobotics Research and Applications Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. She is developing a software program system that emulates human behavior for use in a Mars robot rover. The robot will search the surface of the Red Planet for evidence of water and life and will pave the way for human exploration.