Related papers: Autonomy and Perception for Space Mining
Asteroid mining can become an enabling technology to establish a sustainable manned colony on Mars, which requires metallic materials more often than they are readily available in shipments from Earth. This paper describes a feasibility…
The growing ambition for space exploration demands robust autonomous systems that can operate in unstructured environments under extreme extraterrestrial conditions. The adoption of robot learning in this domain is severely hindered by the…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
The Mining industry considers the deployment of MAV for autonomous inspection of tunnels and shafts to increase safety and productivity. However, mines are challenging and harsh environments that have a direct effect on the degradation of…
Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…
Autonomous systems will play an essential role in many applications across diverse domains including space, marine, air, field, road, and service robotics. They will assist us in our daily routines and perform dangerous, dirty and dull…
The research and development of intelligent automation solutions is a ground-breaking point for the factory of the future. A promising and challenging mission is the use of autonomous robot systems to automate tasks in the field of…
While much research explores improving robot capabilities, there is a deficit in researching how robots are expected to perform tasks safely, especially in high-risk problem domains. Robots must earn the trust of human operators in order to…
Shared autonomy is a promising paradigm in robotic systems, particularly within the maritime domain, where complex, high-risk, and uncertain environments necessitate effective human-robot collaboration. This paper investigates the…
This paper presents a self-contained system for the robust utilization of aerial robots in the autonomous exploration of cave environments to help human explorers, first responders, and speleologists. The proposed system is generally…
Geophysical imaging of the lunar near-surface structure will be key for in situ resource utilization, identification of hazards for crews and infrastructure, and answering science questions on the formation and interior of the Moon. The…
We address the problem of autonomous exploration and mapping for a mobile robot using visual inputs. Exploration and mapping is a well-known and key problem in robotics, the goal of which is to enable a robot to explore a new environment…
NASA's Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) mission, slated for flight to the Moon's Reiner Gamma region in 2025/2026, is designed to demonstrate multi-agent autonomous exploration of the Lunar surface and…
Commercial lunar activity is accelerating the need for reliable surface infrastructure and routine operations to keep it functioning. Maintenance tasks such as inspection, cleaning, dust mitigation, and minor repair are essential to…
Autonomous regolith excavation is a cornerstone of in-situ resource utilization for a sustained human presence beyond Earth. However, this task is fundamentally hindered by the complex interaction dynamics of granular media and the…
In collaborative robotic cells, a human operator and a robot share the workspace in order to execute a common job, consisting of a set of tasks. A proper allocation and scheduling of the tasks for the human and for the robot is crucial for…
Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) near the lunar poles are of interest for future exploration due to their potential to contain water ice and preserve geological records. Their complex, uneven terrain favors the use of legged robots,…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of deployment of fleets of autonomous vehicles. As the problem scales up, in terms of autonomous vehicles number and complexity of their objectives, there is a growing need for decision-support…
As robot autonomy improves, robots are increasingly being considered in the role of autonomous observation systems -- free-flying cameras capable of actively tracking human activity within some predefined area of interest. In this work, we…
In the future, service robots are expected to be able to operate autonomously for long periods of time without human intervention. Many work striving for this goal have been emerging with the development of robotics, both hardware and…