Building better space robots

Science: Robots for future space exploration missions will need to be smarter: Researchers are working to program robots to circumvent danger, spot enticing features on their own, and perform experiments without human input. Besides achieving better results, greater autonomous behavior would make robots more efficient by improving their energy storage, speed, and heating and cooling capabilities, among other things. Toward that end, NASA has been designing software, which has been used on the Mars rover Opportunity, to seek out a single property of an object, such as finding the largest or the darkest rock. Paradoxically, however, the rover has to be told when to be autonomous and when not to.