AI Reaches Space: NASA is Developing AI Chatbots for Astronauts

Being developed at NASA, the AI Chatbot will allow astronauts to have a conversation with their spacecraft while also allowing mission controllers to converse with AI robots exploring distant planets

If you have a fantastic movie taste and a knack for space stuff, you have probably watched ‘Interstellar’, a Christopher Nolan movie that involves space travel and includes ‘TARS’, a robot with human-like intelligence, which probably was built using AI.

While NASA has not been able to create something similar to the likes of ‘TARS’, it seems like it’s not very far away; This is because the organization is working on AI chatbots that can be integrated inside spacecrafts to allow astronauts to have a conversation with their spacecraft while also integrating it inside planet exploring robots, allowing mission controllers to have a real-time conversation with them.

“The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they are also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond,” says Dr Larissa Suzuki, who is a visiting teacher at NASA.

“It’s really not like science fiction any more”

If my statement in the first line got you all excited then reading some of these statements by Dr. Suzuki will make your mind blow;

Dr. Suzuki says that interplanetary communications networks that have inbuilt AI will be able to detect and fix glitches much faster than the communication networks being used right now.

“It alerts mission operators that there is a likelihood that package transmissions from space vehicle X will be lost or will fail delivery. We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow,” said Dr. Suzuki.

Dr. Suzuki says that the AI communication network will not just allow astronauts and researchers to communicate with spacecrafts, it would also allow spacecrafts to communicate with one another allowing them to exchange information and be updated.

“The spacecraft do collaborative updates based on what’s seen by other spacecraft,” she said.