Intel Chip Chat

With no GPS in space, how can a rover know its exact location on a lunar surface? In this Chip Chap podcast, Phil Ludivig, rover navigation engineer with iSpace, Inc.* joins Shashi Jain, innovation manager at Intel, to talk about research that applied AI to one of the biggest challenges in space exploration. Ludivig and Jain, along with other researchers, came together at NASA Frontier Development Lab (NASA FDL) to tackle questions facing NASA and the commercial space industry. Their team took on one of the most fundamental – and answered it a highly inventive way. Starting with a game engine, the team created a simulated lunar environment to train an AI algorithm that produced the ground truth needed for machine learning. Next, they created synthetic images, called reprojections, from cameras mounted on a rover. AI matched reprojected images to actual orbital images, figuring out terrain features that made sense. The team used Intel® AI DevCloud for inference, an Intel Core™ i7+ PC and Intel Xeon® Scal