“NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s human rover planners…

During the demonstration, the team leveraged a type of generative AI called vision-language models to analyze existing data from JPL’s surface mission dataset. The AI used the same imagery and data that human planners rely on to generate waypoints — fixed locations where the rover takes up a new set of instructions — so that Perseverance could safely navigate the challenging Martian terrain.”

From NASA.