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Autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations around uncooperative, unknown spacecraft are critical for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing missions. A key component of such operations is the offline reconstruction of a 3D model…
The success of a multi-kilometre drive by a solar-powered rover at the lunar south pole depends upon careful planning in space and time due to highly dynamic solar illumination conditions. An additional challenge is that the rover may be…
For robots navigating using only a camera, illumination changes in indoor environments can cause re-localization failures during autonomous navigation. In this paper, we present a multi-session visual SLAM approach to create a map made of…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems often have imperfect performance, affecting the `integrity' of position estimates and subsequent robot navigation decisions. Previously, SVM classifiers have been used to monitor VPR integrity. This…
To expedite space exploration on Mars, it is indispensable to develop an efficient Martian image compression method for transmitting images through the constrained Mars-to-Earth communication channel. Although the existing learned…
Visual localization, i.e., camera pose estimation in a known scene, is a core component of technologies such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. State-of-the-art localization approaches often rely on image retrieval techniques for…
We advocate for the realization of volatile sample return from various destinations including: small bodies, the Moon, Mars, ocean worlds/satellites, and plumes. As part of recent mission studies (e.g., Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple…
Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) will unlock their true potential once they can operate in groups. To this end, it is essential for them to estimate on-board the relative location of their neighbors. The challenge lies in limiting the mass and…
A central challenge in data visualization is to understand which data samples are required to generate an image of a data set in which the relevant information is encoded. In this work, we make a first step towards answering the question of…
The Landform contextual mesh fuses 2D and 3D data from up to thousands of Mars 2020 rover images, along with orbital elevation and color maps from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, into an interactive 3D terrain visualization. Contextual meshes…
We present a method for image-guided exploration for mobile robotic systems. Our approach extends ergodic exploration methods, a recent exploration approach that prioritizes complete coverage of a space, with the use of a learned image…
This paper proposes a fine-grained self-localization method for outdoor robotics that utilizes a flexible number of onboard cameras and readily accessible satellite images. The proposed method addresses limitations in existing cross-view…
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Space Resources Innovation Centre (ESRIC) created the Space Resources Challenge to invite researchers and companies to propose innovative solutions for Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) space…
In future operations on the lunar surface, automated vehicles will be required to transport cargo between known locations. Such vehicles must be able to navigate precisely in safe regions to avoid natural hazards, human-constructed…
The problem of localization on a geo-referenced satellite map given a query ground view image is useful yet remains challenging due to the drastic change in viewpoint. To this end, in this paper we work on the extension of our earlier work…
Visual localization is the task of estimating camera pose in a known scene, which is an essential problem in robotics and computer vision. However, long-term visual localization is still a challenge due to the environmental appearance…
This paper presents a novel method for qualitative mapping of large scale spaces. The proposed framework makes use of a graphical representation of the world in order to build a map consisting of qualitative constraints on the geometric…
Semiautonomous rover scaling is examined for exploration throughout the solar system. Communications to a relay orbiter is a major constraint, due to power requirements and decreasing antenna gain at small sizes. Also, analysis time scales…
Visual localization techniques often comprise a hierarchical localization pipeline, with a visual place recognition module used as a coarse localizer to initialize a pose refinement stage. While improving the pose refinement step has been…
Visual localization for planar moving robot is important to various indoor service robotic applications. To handle the textureless areas and frequent human activities in indoor environments, a novel robust visual localization algorithm…