Posted 3/14/2024, 6:00:01 PM
Russia Tests AI System to Autonomously Dock Spacecraft
- Russia's Soyuz spacecraft with 3 astronauts approaches ISS for docking in Sept 2023
- Docking spacecraft together precisely is tricky, especially without humans guiding it
- Researchers devised an AI system called "Autonomous Rendezvous Transformer" (ART) to plan docking maneuvers
- ART uses same Transformer architecture as ChatGPT to crunch spacecraft trajectories rather than words
- After computer simulations, researchers want to test ART system in a mock space environment before trying it in orbit