AI on Mars: NASA’s Vandi Verma

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:02)
What can we learn from the use of AI on Mars? Find out on today's episode.

**Vandi Verma** (0:09)
I'm Vandi Verma from NASJPL, and you're listening to Me, Myself, an AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:15)
Welcome to Me, Myself, an AI., a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI in Business Strategy Guest Editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:33)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:01)
Hey, everyone. Welcome. Today, Shervin and I are honestly crazy excited to be talking with Vandi Verma, the chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's really cool stuff.
Vandi, from the sneak preview that we had, we're really excited to have you on the show. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

**Vandi Verma** (1:16)
Thank you for having me here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:18)
Admit, I'm really geekily fascinated by your job. I'm sure everyone is, but let's clue in everybody on what you do. Can you start by giving an overview of JPL in general and your particular role?

**Vandi Verma** (1:31)
I am the Deputy Manager for the Mobility and Robotic System at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And I'm also the Chief Engineer for the Mars 2020 mission, which consists of the Perseverance Rover and the Ingenuity Helicopter.
JPL is a NASA center that specializes in building robots for space exploration. And NASA's mission is to explore, discover, and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity. And what we do is the robotics aspect of that.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:02)
When you say robotics, I think about artificial intelligence.
But Mars missions seem like a very challenging place for new technologies like AI. How are you and JPL using AI in what you're doing with robotics?

**Vandi Verma** (2:17)
Right. AI has sort of transformed what we call that over a period of time. And there are things that we do on the ground and there are things that we do onboard our robots. And so I'm going to touch on some of those. So in general, we are more on the side of autonomous capability, closer to what you might think of as what self-driving cars use.
And not a lot of it is potentially classically machine learning per se, although we use that to inform a lot of our work.
In fact, with Perseverance, 88% of the driving that we've done is autonomous driving.
And so the Rover has cameras. It's taking the images. It's detecting the terrain and figuring out what's hazardous and navigating around obstacles.
And it's actually quite interesting because it's driving on terrain that no human has ever seen. So we can't even give it that kind of information, right? So that is definitely a form of autonomous navigation. We also, at the end of drives, are trying to make a lot of progress because we're in this really harsh environment. And we have a mission to collect and cache a certain number of samples with Perseverance because for the first time we are actually going to bring them back to Earth. But we want them to be from as distinct places as possible. So we want to do a lot of driving. So if you stop all the time, you're not going to make as much progress. But who knows if there's something really exciting along the way that we're just going to miss.
In our world we call it the dinosaur bone. So we have AI capabilities on the rover where it will take a wide angle image, look at a large swath of terrain, and then try to figure out what is the most interesting feature in there.
We have a whole slew of instruments, but one of the instruments is the SuperCam instrument, which does a lot. It has a laser, and from a distance you can shoot a laser at a rock, and it creates a plasma.
And we study that with a telescopic lens. That is such a narrow field of view, you know, a Miller radiance. And so if you were to try and do that to the whole view you see, you'd spend days there. So essentially we'd use the AI to figure out what's the most interesting thing that we should zap. And then you can, you know, send the data back and tell the scientists on Earth. That's been very valuable as well. So we do that.