by NASA quietly training robot dog to navigate landscape of the Moon
With little fanfare, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers — including engineers, planetary scientists, and cognitive scientists — let loose a quadruped robot called Spirit at an altitude of 6,000 feet on the snowy and rocky hills of Oregon's Mount Hood.
The project called Legged Autonomous Surface Science in Analog Environments (LASSIE) is designed to teach the robot to adapt to its varying environment in real-time, with the goal of eventually having it traverse the surface of the Moon and perhaps even other worlds in our solar system.
"A legged robot needs to be able to detect what is happening when it interacts with the ground underneath, and rapidly adjust its locomotion strategies accordingly," said University of Southern California assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Feifei Qian in a statement.
