17 accepted papers
Resource mapping and prospecting has become the focus of a number of proposed planetary exploration missions, particularly to locate water ice at the lunar south pole. Mobile robots, which are employed for exploration tasks in environments that are inaccessible to humans, collect the information in …
Robots are often employed in hazardous or inaccessible environments, such as disaster sites, extraterrestrial terrains, agricultural fields, and ocean floors. Autonomous operation is crucial in these scenarios to reduce reliance on human operators and enable real-time decision-making. However, robot
We develop a coverage approach for heterogeneous agents that leverages the different sensing and motion capabilities of a team. Coverage performance is measured using ergodicity, which when optimized balances exploitation versus exploration, where areas of interest are indicated with an information
Spectral mapping, typically performed at the orbital scale, is hard at the rover scale as it necessitates larger coverage and field operable spectrometers. In this work, we propose using RGB cameras to assist spectral mapping. RGB cameras placed on a wide range of robotic platforms, including aerial…
Robotic explorers are essential tools for gathering information about regions that are inaccessible to humans. For applications like planetary exploration or search and rescue, robots use prior knowledge about the area to guide their search. Ergodic search methods find trajectories that effectively…
This work introduces range-based GP maps, which directly represent terrain by modeling the range from a LiDAR sensor as a Gaussian process (GP) in spherical space. Such a model aligns the predicted uncertainty from the GP regression with the uncertainty in the underlying sensor observations. Experim…
This work grapples with the challenge of directing autonomous decision making by planetary rovers conducting science investigations. Most of the related work addresses obstacle avoidance and traversabilty, while less work seeks to directly improve science yield. This research develops a comprehensiv
Perception using stereo requires external light. In the absence of natural light, active, structured light provides light where it is needed. In this work, we demonstrate how a free moving line striping laser can be used to perceive and model terrains. In this formulation, we do not need to know the…
In this paper, we present an active SLAM framework for volumetric exploration of 3D underwater environments with multibeam sonar. Recent work in integrated SLAM and planning performs localization while maintaining volumetric free-space information. However, an absence of informative loop closures ca…
Maintaining high levels of productivity for planetary rover missions is very difficult due to limited communication and heavy reliance on ground control. There is a need for autonomy that enables more adaptive and efficient actions based on real-time information. This paper presents an autonomous ma…
This letter addresses the path planning problem for a rover on deformable, sloped terrains. As such terrains induce high slip and possible immobilization of rovers, finding a path that avoids critical slip is important for traversing the terrains. However, it is difficult to predict rover slippage p
Remote sensing measurements can provide crucial information about the material properties of a planetary surface but their application is limited by their spatial resolution, typically tens of meters per pixel, when constituent materials are mixed at much finer scale. Consequently the orbital observ…
The capability and mobility of exploration robots is increasing rapidly, yet missions will always be constrained by one main resource: time. Time limits the number of samples a robot can collect, sites it can analyze, and the availability of human oversight, so it is imperative the robot is able to…
Plant phenotyping is the measurement of observable plant traits. Current methods for phenotyping in the field are labour intensive and error prone. High throughput plant phenotyping in an automated and noninvasive manner is crucial to accelerating plant breeding methods. Occlusions and non-ideal sen…
Automatically correlating plant observable characteristics to their underlying genetics will streamline selection methods in plant breeding. Measurement of plant observable characteristics is called phenotyping, and knowing plant phenotypes accurately and throughout a plant's growth is central to ma…
Planetary exploration involves frequent scientific reformulation and replanning. It is limited by communication constraints and to overcome this limitation, this paper formulates the process as a collaboration in which the human scientist and the robot work together to fill in gaps in knowledge to m…
Efficient exploration of unknown terrains by extraterrestrial rovers requires the development of strategies that reduce the entropy in the geological classification of a given terrain. Without such intelligent strategies, teleoperation of the rover is reliant either on human intuition or on the exha…