For future exploration missions, artificial intelligence (AI) will play an important role in the development of intelligent systems. However, because programming and experimenting with physical hardware is difficult, AI techniques are often developed using unrealistic and overly simplified assumptions. Consequently, there is a large gap between the AI theories and the envisioned applications of intelligent systems in space exploration. The nomadic, flexible, robotic, AI testbed presents a solution to bridge this gap by providing a fully-integrated robotic system with flexible hardware and software design, an adaptive robot simulator, and a library of robot reasoning and introspection functions. In addition to being a flexible AI testbed, the adaptive simulator provides a dynamic description of the robot and its environment so that the robot can modify this description using its introspective reasoning capabilities to improve its performance.
Potential Commercial Applications:Since the nomadic, flexible, robotic, AI testbed encourages the experimentation of a wide range of AI techniques on general purpose robotic system, the testbed will be an integral part of potential commercial applications that require intelligent motion capabilities.
