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NASA's Perseverance Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars

NASA's Perseverance Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars

JPL team used generative AI to create waypoints for the rover, a task typically performed by human route planners
By Caltech Alumni
February 3, 2026

NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed the first drives on another world planned by artificial intelligence. On December 8 and 10, the rover executed routes generated by vision-language AI models that analyzed orbital imagery and terrain data to identify hazards and create safe waypoints—complex decision-making work traditionally done manually by JPL’s human rover planners.

The demonstration, led out of JPL’s Rover Operations Center in collaboration with Anthropic, points toward a future where AI helps surface rovers handle kilometer-scale drives while flagging features from vast volumes of imagery.

Read more at NASA/JPL | How Claude planned the route (Anthropic)