Kanna holds an International Chair Professorship as an Adjunt at NTNU's Engineering Cybernetics department (ITK) in Gløshaugen, Trondheim.

His career has spanned academia, private industry and the non-profit world all in the United States and mostly in California. His background is in Autonomous Systems, in particular in Automated Planning and Execution and agent architectures. His work lies at the insticies of AI, Robotics and Oceanography. He spent more than 10 years at NASA Ames Research Center where his software flew on two space missions, the 1999 New Millennium Deep Space One Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) and the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission (MER) where he was the Principal Investigator (PI) of the MAPGEN command/control system of the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity on the surface of Mars. He has numerous awards from the US space agency, including a Software of the Year award and a Public Service Medal for the Remote Agent and an Exceptional Service Medal for MER.

Subsequently he moved to MBARI, a private non-profit ocean science and engineering institution on Monterey Bay while moving to work in the domain of Marine Robotics. He joined ITK in 2016 while continuing to be affiliated with Portugal's Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto and its Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory.