Related papers: The NRL Program in X-ray Navigation

We report the results of simultaneous observations of the Vela pulsar in X-rays and radio from the RXTE satellite and the Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory in Tasmania. We sought correlations between the Vela's X-ray emission and radio…

Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal…

Methods for navigation based on large-scale learning typically treat each episode as a new problem, where the agent is spawned with a clean memory in an unknown environment. While these generalization capabilities to an unknown environment…

Electromagnetic fields surrounding pulsars may source coherent ultralight axion signals at the known rotational frequencies of the neutron stars, which can be detected by laboratory experiments (e.g., pulsarscopes). As a promising case…

Astrophysical jets exist in both XRBs and AGN, and seem to share common features, particularly in the radio. While AGN jets are known to emit X-rays, the situation for XRB jets is not so clear. Radio jets have been resolved in several XRBs…

X-rays are a powerful probe of the physical conditions in the nuclei of active galaxies. We review the X-ray properties of radio-quiet AGN, LINERs and ultraluminous IR galaxies based on observations carried out with the X-ray satellite…

Learned Neural Network based policies have shown promising results for robot navigation. However, most of these approaches fall short of being used on a real robot due to the extensive simulated training they require. These simulations lack…

Explainable reinforcement learning (XRL) is an emerging subfield of explainable machine learning that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal of XRL is to elucidate the decision-making process of learning agents in…

The question of the X-ray background has been largely settled over the last 10 years using the ROSAT satellite. About 70-80 % of the soft X-ray background was resolved into discrete sources, which are mainly X-ray and optically unobscured…

The great success of the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has shown that X-ray timing is an excellent tool for the study of strong gravitational fields and the measurement of fundamental physical properties of black holes and neutron…

We review the current status of studies of large-scale structure in the X-ray Universe. After motivating the use X-rays for cosmological purposes, we discuss the various approaches used on different angular scales including X-ray background…

Navigation is one of the most heavily studied problems in robotics, and is conventionally approached as a geometric mapping and planning problem. However, real-world navigation presents a complex set of physical challenges that defies…

We propose a novel visual localization and navigation framework for real-world environments directly integrating observed visual information into the bird-eye-view map. While the renderable neural radiance map (RNR-Map) shows considerable…

XAssist is a NASA AISR-funded project for the automation of X-ray astrophysics, with emphasis on galaxies. It is nearing completion of its initially funded effort, and is working well for Chandra and ROSAT HRI data. Initial support for…

Accretion-powered X-ray pulsars offer a unique opportunity to study physics under extreme conditions. To fully exploit this potential, the interrelated problems of modelling radiative transport and the dynamical structure of the accretion…

The navigation problem is classically approached in two steps: an exploration step, where map-information about the environment is gathered; and an exploitation step, where this information is used to navigate efficiently. Deep…

Background has played an important role in X-ray missions, limiting the exploitation of science data in several and sometimes unexpected ways. In this presentation I review past X-ray missions focusing on some important lessons we can learn…

We present PRM-RL, a hierarchical method for long-range navigation task completion that combines sampling based path planning with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL agents learn short-range, point-to-point navigation policies that capture…

X-ray flares, lasting for $\sim 100 - 1000$ s in the X-ray band, are often observed following gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The physical origin of X-ray flares is still unknown merely with the temporal/spectral information. On the other hand,…

The X-ray Telescope (XRT), on board the {\it Swift} satellite, provides: automated source detection and position with few arcsecond accuracy within few seconds from target acquisition; CCD spectroscopy and imaging capability (0.2-10 keV),…