Fuzzy logic makes a comeback – in picking where Earth sticks its probes into alien worlds MIT boffins reckon they can use old-school artificial intelligence to do much of the grunt work in the tricky task of picking suitable landing spots for spacecraft. in a paper for the Earth and Space Science journal, the US-based researchers described a tool that can automatically examine maps of the Martian surface, and say …
This post has been deleted by its author
Using fuzzy logic to select landing sites doesn't make a lot of sense to me, for two reasons. Firstly, you don't need fuzzy logic to establish the gradient of a patch of terrain (or, for that matter, its roughness i.e. covered in boulders) - very simple algorithms can do this. And secondly, probes are landed where there is something of interest to be investigated, not because its easy to land at that location; choosing a landing site just based upon the relative ease of landing is pointless if there's nothing interesting there, or at least within a reasonable travel range, to be investigated; you don't want to run the risk of a problem developing, such as part of the probe wearing out or getting damaged, before it can start doing its work.
"The software uses fuzzy logic algorithms, which were introduced in the 1960s and were rather trendy in the 1990s."
Like me, ska, and platform shoes.
I recall how proud our developers were using fuzzy logic in handwriting recognition, realising it would look good on their CVs when exploring Mars a quarter of a century later.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
