Making AI Possible - Out of This World Autonomy and AI - March 2026

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Recorded09 Mar 2026

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Show notes

Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. In our third episode of Making AI Possible for Season 2, we present Out of This World Autonomy and AI. Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin welcomes guest Issa Nesnas, Principal Robotics Technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose work spans multiple generations of martian and lunar rovers and foundational autonomy systems. Together, Nicholas and Issa will explore the harsh realities of operating on planetary bodies, from communication delays and radiation-hardened processors to unpredictable terrain and irreversible mistakes. The conversation digs into: • how computer vision functions in unknown environments • how onboard systems make decisions with limited compute • what “autonomy assurance” really means when a single error can end a mission This is a look at the engineering discipline required to build AI systems that are bounded, tested, and trusted where failure is permanent.

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