Related papers: Autonomy and Perception for Space Mining
Planetary rover missions must utilize machine learning-based perception to continue extra-terrestrial exploration with little to no human presence. Martian terrain segmentation has been critical for rover navigation and hazard avoidance to…
The foundation of this paper is an experiment of fifteen participants interacting directly with an autonomous robot. The task for the participants was to carry a table, in two different setups, together with a robot, which is intended to…
The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual…
Being able to explore an environment and understand the location and type of all objects therein is important for indoor robotic platforms that must interact closely with humans. However, it is difficult to evaluate progress in this area…
With the rising applications of robots in unstructured real-world environments, roboticists are increasingly concerned with the problems posed by the complexity of such environments. One solution to these problems is robot autonomy. Since…
In the Earth's magnetosphere, there are fewer than a dozen dedicated probes beyond low-Earth orbit making in-situ observations at any given time. As a result, we poorly understand its global structure and evolution, the mechanisms of its…
The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-Gateway, or simply Gateway) is a crewed platform that will be assembled and operated in the vicinity of the Moon by NASA and international partner organizations, including ESA, starting from the…
Regardless of their industrial or research application, the streamlining of robot operations is limited by the proximity of experienced users to the actual hardware. Be it massive open online robotics courses, crowd-sourcing of robot task…
This paper develops a communication-efficient distributed mapping approach for rapid exploration of a cave by a multi-robot team. Subsurface planetary exploration is an unsolved problem challenged by communication, power, and compute…
Autonomous exploration of unknown environments has been widely applied in inspection, surveillance, and search and rescue. In exploration task, the basic requirement for robots is to detect the unknown space as fast as possible. In this…
Nowadays, robots are deployed as mobile platforms equipped with sensing, communication and computing capabilities, especially in the mining industry, where they perform tasks in hazardous and repetitive environments. Despite their…
Producing robust task plans in human-robot collaborative missions is a critical activity in order to increase the likelihood of these missions completing successfully. Despite the broad research body in the area, which considers different…
As humanity prepares for new missions to the Moon and Mars, astronauts will need to operate with greater autonomy, given the communication delays that make real-time support from Earth difficult. For instance, messages between Mars and…
Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path…
An unsolved challenge in cooking automation is designing for shared kitchen workspaces. In particular, robots struggle with dexterity in the unstructured and dynamic kitchen environment. We propose that human-machine collaboration can be…
Robotic science missions in remote environments, such as deep ocean and outer space, can involve studying phenomena that cannot directly be observed using on-board sensors but must be deduced by combining measurements of correlated…
Recent advances in 3D printing and manufacturing of miniaturized robotic hardware and computing are paving the way to build inexpensive and disposable robots. This will have a large impact on several applications including scientific…
The resurgent era of lunar exploration is defined by a strategic shift from temporary visits to a sustained international and commercial presence, resulting in an unprecedented demand for a robust and continuously available communication…
This work presents an approach for robots to suitably carry out complex applications characterized by the presence of multiple additional constraints or subtasks (e.g. obstacle and self-collision avoidance) but subject to redundancy…
In this paper, we present a field report of the mapping of the Athabasca Glacier, using a custom-made lidar-inertial mapping platform. With the increasing autonomy of robotics, a wider spectrum of applications emerges. Among these, the…