Related papers: Field Target Allocation and Routing Algorithms for…
Robotic manipulation in complex, constrained spaces is vital for widespread applications but challenging, particularly when navigating narrow passages with elongated objects. Existing planning methods often fail in these low-clearance…
Wide field small aperture telescopes are widely used for optical transient observations. Detection and classification of astronomical targets in observed images are the most important and basic step. In this paper, we propose an…
Perception-for-grasping is a challenging problem in robotics. Inexpensive range sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect provide sensing capabilities that have given new life to the effort of developing robust and accurate perception methods…
Astrophotonics lies at the interface of astronomy and photonics. This burgeoning field -- now formally recognized by the optics community -- has emerged over the past decade in response to the increasing demands of astronomical…
The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have…
We present here a new robotic telescope called TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope). Equipped with a high-quality CCD camera mounted on a 0.6 meter light weight optical tube, TRAPPIST has been installed in April…
Robotic mapping is useful in scientific applications that involve surveying unstructured environments. This paper presents a target-oriented mapping system for sparsely distributed geologic surface features, such as precariously balanced…
Robotic aerial base stations (RABSs) that are able to anchor at tall urban landforms are expected to bring further flexibility to millimeter-wave (mmWave) multi-hop backhaul networks in highly dense urban environments. In this paper, a…
The increased need in pointing performance for Earth observation and science Space missions together with the use of lighter and flexible structures directly come with the need of a robust pointing performance budget from the very beginning…
For several tasks, ranging from manipulation to inspection, it is beneficial for robots to localize a target object in their surroundings. In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes coarse point clouds obtained from miniaturized…
A robust measurement of the clustering amplitude of the sub-mm population of starburst galaxies requires large-area surveys (>> 1 deg^2). The largest-format arrays subtend only 10 arcmin^2 on the sky and hence scan-mapping is a necessary…
Stratospheric High Altitude Balloons (HABs) have great potential as a remote sensing platform for Earth Observations that complements orbiting satellites and low flying drones. At altitudes between 20-35 kms, HABs operate significantly…
We present a distributed algorithm for a swarm of active particles to camouflage in an environment. Each particle is equipped with sensing, computation and communication, allowing the system to take color and gradient information from the…
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, consisting of 5020 robotic fiber positioners and associated systems on the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona, is carrying out a survey to measure the spectra of 40 million galaxies and quasars…
Tiny palm-sized aerial robots possess exceptional agility and cost-effectiveness in navigating confined and cluttered environments. However, their limited payload capacity directly constrains the sensing suite on-board the robot, thereby…
The flapping-wing aerial vehicle (FWAV) is a new type of flying robot that mimics the flight mode of birds and insects. However, FWAVs have their special characteristics of less load capacity and short endurance time, so that most existing…
We present TartanGround, a large-scale, multi-modal dataset to advance the perception and autonomy of ground robots operating in diverse environments. This dataset, collected in various photorealistic simulation environments includes…
This paper addresses the challenges of optimally placing a finite number of sensors to detect Poisson-distributed targets in a bounded domain. We seek to rigorously account for uncertainty in the target arrival model throughout the problem.…
Astrometry is one of the oldest branches of astronomy which measures the position, the proper motion and parallax of celestial objects. Following the Hipparcos and Gaia missions that have measured several billions of them using global…
High-precision tiny object alignment remains a common and critical challenge for humanoid robots in real-world. To address this problem, this paper proposes a vision-based framework for precisely estimating and controlling the relative…