You can help a Mars Rover’s AI learn to tell rocks from dirt – TechCrunch

You can help a Mars Rover’s AI learn to tell rocks from dirt – TechCrunch

Curiosity doesn’t navigate on its own; there’s a whole team of people on Earth who analyze the imagery coming back from Mars and plot a path forward for the mobile science laboratory. In order to do so, however, they need to examine the imagery carefully to understand exactly where rocks, soil, sand and other features are.

This is exactly the type of task that machine learning systems are good at: You give them a lot of images with the salient features on them labeled clearly, and they learn to find similar features in unlabeled images.

Source: techcrunch.com/2020/06/12/you-can-help-a-mars-rovers-ai-learn-to-tell-rocks-from-dirt/