The
NASA FY24 AI Inventory (listing all use cases using AI tools developed in-house) was presumably updated in early January 2025 for the simple reason that two new AI use cases had been implemented in 2024, which were, however, totally unrelated to Perseverance’s autonomous navigation system.
Being an inventory, it means that all older (=pre-2024) AI use cases get listed, too (including those developed for the Mars 2020 Mission), so the list will get longer year by year.
I also took a screenshot of that same table earlier today:
View attachment 75523
Not sure why they haven’t updated all Mars 2020-related use cases to “In mission”*, but take a look at the “date implemented” column:
Enhanced Autonavigation for Perseverance Rover on Mars:
July 1, 2020
Mars2020 Rover (Perseverance):
1 July 2020
Onboard Planner for Mars2020 Rover (Perseverance):
1 July 2020 (here it does say “in mission”)
(-> all implemented on the same day, shortly before the Perseverance Mars rover’s encapsulation, getting ready for the launch on July 30, 2020)
as well as
Perseverance Rover on Mars - Terrain Relative Navigation:
18 February 2021
(the day of the entry, descent and landing aka EDL on Mars)
*By the way, the very first use case named AEGIS is also listed as “in production” and its description has never been properly updated: “AEGIS enables intelligent targeting and data acquisition by planetary rovers (…) It is currently in use on the MSL mission to acquire data for the ChemCam instrument.
It is planned for use in Spring of 2022 on the M2020 mission to acquire data for the SuperCam instrument.”
But back to your original post: You had highlighted the following on the 2019 NASA fact sheet about Mars 2020 and Perseverance…
… and tried to establish a connection between the 2020 SBIR I proposing to use Akida to increase the performance of NASA’s autonomous rovers “to allow for greater speeds” and Perseverance’s “new autonomous navigation system [that] will allow the rover to drive faster in challenging terrain”:
“What I thought of immediately was the 2020 SBIR, which I have posted below for your convenience, which described how AKIDA was to potentially be utilised to make autonomous rovers travel faster. So it occurred to me that this 2020 SBIR which AKIDA was featured in might be part of the whole "Mars2020 Rover" thingamajig.
I had a quick Google search under "Mars2020 Rover" and I found this NASA Fact Sheet from 2019. The second page states "A new autonomous navigation system will allow the rover to drive faster in challenging terrain", which 100% ties into the goals described in the 2020 SBIR!”
As mentioned earlier, the 2020 SBIR grant’s starting date was
after Perseverance’s launch. So it could only ever be potentially relevant for
future Mars rovers (once the research would have climbed up the TRL ladder, that is) - but such future missions will be carried out under a different name,
not Mars 2020.
If I’m not mistaken, NASA’s next proposed Mars landing will be a joint mission with ESA called “The NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return” to return samples from the Martian surface to Earth, which are being collected and cached by Perseverance, but there won’t be any novel autonomously navigating rover involved, just two sample recovery helicopters (modeled on the Mars 2020 Mission helicopter Ingenuity (2021-2024) ) as a backup for Perseverance.
Correct me if I am wrong, but so far, we haven’t heard anything about a SBIR II phase of that Vorago Technologies (previously Silicon Space Technology Corporation) proposal with Jim Carlquist as principal investigator, and a search on NASA’s website didn’t yield any relevant results beyond said SBIR I CNN RNN project, for which BrainChip received a one-time payment of US$ 50,000 from NASA on 21 Dec 2020 according to
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80NSSC21P0633_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-
Can you provide any further information regarding the project’s current status?
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