11 accepted papers
Visual–Inertial Odometry (VIO) provides smooth, high-rate state estimates and has been widely used for robotic navigation in both terrestrial and planetary applications. However, its performance is typically dependent on the frequency of visual updates, which is a challenge for planetary rovers oper…
Snake robots enable mobility through extreme terrains and confined environments in terrestrial and space applications. However, robust perception and localization for snake robots remain an open challenge due to the proximity of the sensor payload to the ground coupled with a limited field of view.
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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…
The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) is a snake-like mobile instruments platform under development at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a mission concept to find evidence of life on Saturn's sixth largest moon, Enceladus. To conduct a life surveying mission there, the EELS platform must firs…
The ocean world Europa is a prime target for exploration given its potential habitability [1]. We propose a mobile robotic system that is capable of autonomously traversing tens of meters to visit multiple sites of interest on a Europan analogue surface. Due to the topology of Europan terrain being…
Many areas of scientific interest in planetary exploration, such as lunar pits, icy-moon crevasses, and Martian craters, are inaccessible to current wheeled rovers. Rappelling rovers can safely traverse these steep surfaces, but require techniques to navigate their complex terrain. This dynamic navi…
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
Our work builds upon Visual Teach & Repeat 2 (VT&R2): a vision-in-the-loop autonomous navigation system that enables the rapid construction of route networks, safely built through operator-controlled driving. Added routes can be followed autonomously using visual localization. To enable long-term op…
Vision-based, route-following algorithms enable autonomous robots to repeat manually taught paths over long distances using inexpensive vision sensors. However, these methods struggle with long-term, outdoor operation due to the challenges of environmental appearance change caused by lighting, weath…
Stereo Visual Teach & Repeat (VT&R) is a system for long-range, autonomous route following in unstructured 3D environments. As this system relies on a passive sensor to localize, it is highly susceptible to changes in lighting conditions. Recent work in the optics community has provided a method to…