14 accepted papers
The discovery of ocean worlds such as Enceladus, Titan, and Europa motivates the development of versatile autonomous mobility systems to enable the next era of space exploration where there is large uncertainty in terrain specifications due to a lack of prior surface reconnaissance missions. To expl…
Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g., subterranean) environments requires a multi-robot system to to
To achieve autonomy in complex real-world exploration missions, we consider deployment strategies for a team of robots with heterogeneous capabilities. We formulate a multi-robot exploration mission and compute an operation policy to maintain robot team productivity and maximize mission success. The…
Semantic object mapping in uncertain, perceptually degraded environments during long-range multi-robot autonomous exploration tasks such as search-and-rescue is important and challenging. During such missions, high recall is desirable to avoid missing true target objects and high precision is also c…
Legged robots can traverse a wide variety of terrains, some of which may be challenging for wheeled robots, such as stairs or highly uneven surfaces. However, quadruped robots face stability challenges on slippery surfaces. This can be resolved by adjusting the robot's locomotion by switching to mor…
Navigating off-road with a fast autonomous vehicle depends on a robust perception system that differentiates traversable from non-traversable terrain. Typically, this depends on a semantic understanding which is based on supervised learning from images annotated by a human expert. This requires a si…
A well-structured and reliable communication system is key to the successful operations of multi-robot systems. In this letter, we present our design and implementation of a multi-robot communication architecture CHORD (Collaborative High-bandwidth Operations with Radio Droppables) based on two popu
This paper serves as one of the first efforts to enable large-scale and long-duration autonomy using the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. Motivated by exploring extreme environments, particularly those involved in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, this paper pushes the boundaries of the state-of-practice…
In addition to conventional ground rovers, the Mars 2020 mission will send a helicopter to Mars. The copter's highresolution data helps the rover to identify small hazards such as steps and pointy rocks, as well as providing rich textual information useful to predict perception performance. In this
This letter presents a prediction algorithm of driving energy for future Mars rover missions. The majority of future Mars rovers would be solar-powered, which would require energy-optimal driving to maximize the range with limited energy. The essential and arguably the most challenging technology fo
Kinematics-based collision detection is important for robot motion planning in unstructured terrain. Especially, planetary rovers require such capability as a single collision may lead to the termination of a mission. For onboard computation, typical numeric approaches are unsuitable as they are com…
As a step towards achieving autonomy in space exploration missions, we consider a cooperative robotics system consisting of a copter and a rover. The goal of the copter is to explore an unknown environment so as to maximize knowledge about a science mission expressed in linear temporal logic that is…
Planetary rovers exploring the surface of Mars rely on vision-based localization and navigation algorithms to estimate their state and plan their motion during autonomous traverses. The accurate estimation of rover's motion enables safe navigation across environments with potentially hazardous terra
Identifying terrain type is crucial to safely operating planetary exploration rovers. Vision-based terrain classifiers, which are typically trained by thousands of labeled images using machine learning methods, have proven to be particularly successful. However, since planetary rovers are to boldly