Livingstone Version 2, I presume

Nitish pointed me to this article about NASA successfully uploading a diagnostic AI software called Livingstone Version 2 onto a satellite. They're using it to simulate and identify faults in its robotic systems and plan alternate courses of action when failures occur. Like most news articles, this one is light on technical details.

Diagnostic software like this isnt new of course, but this seems significant for two reasons:

1. The tasks it preforms are almost completely automated, including the task of contigency planning. That is pretty much unprecedented, especially for the complex systems NASA builds.


2. NASA scientists are calling it a 'reasoner' , and claim that it's a general purpose system that can be easily adapted for most other kinds of machinery they have, like a planetary rover.

This reminds me of the keynote address given by Daniel J. Clancy from the NASA Ames Research Center at AAAI'04 on AI and NASA's New Exploration Vision. He had a rather optimistic outlook on AI's role in future NASA missions. The emphasis at NASA apparently, is not on algorithmic innovation but on architectural innovation. Kenneth Conley has a nice summary of his talk here.