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Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
The New Horizons spacecraft's nominal trajectory crosses the planet's satellite plane at $\sim 10,000\ \rm{km}$ from the barycenter, between the orbits of Pluto and Charon. I have investigated the risk to the spacecraft based on…
Nano-sized drones, with palm-sized form factor, are gaining relevance in the Internet-of-Things ecosystem. Achieving a high degree of autonomy for complex multi-objective missions (e.g., safe flight, exploration, object detection) is…
Inspired by human behavior when traveling over unknown terrain, this study proposes the use of probing strategies and integrates them into a traversability analysis framework to address safe navigation on unknown rough terrain. Our…
At the end of its discovery apparition, the $\sim$60 m near-Earth object 2024 YR4 was associated with a non-zero probability of lunar impact during its 2032 December 22 close approach. While posing no threat to Earth, a lunar impact of this…
The remarkable growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has also sparked concerns about safety measures during their missions. To advance towards safer autonomous aerial robots, this work presents a vision-based solution to ensuring safe…
Soft landing on small celestial bodies (SCBs) poses unique challenges, as gravitational models poorly characterize the higher-order gravitational effects of SCBs. Existing control approaches lack guarantees for safety under gravitational…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are often used for navigating dangerous terrains, however they are difficult to pilot. Due to complex input-output mapping schemes, limited perception, the complex system dynamics and the need to maintain a…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), in particular Drones, have gained significant importance in diverse sectors, mainly military uses. Recently, we can see a growth in acceptance of autonomous UAVs in civilian spaces as well. However, there is…
Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) measurements are crucial for advanced exploration of the laws of fundamental gravitational physics and geophysics. Current LLR technology allows us to measure distances to the Moon with a precision approaching 1…
We present a light-weight body-terrain clearance evaluation algorithm for the automated path planning of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. Extraterrestrial path planning is challenging due to the combination of terrain roughness and severe limitation…
Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision…
We present fast algorithms to automatically estimate the statistical position of the bow shock from spacecraft data, using existing analytical two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) models of the shock surface. We derive…
Enhanced AutoNav (ENav), the baseline surface navigation software for NASA's Perseverance rover, sorts a list of candidate paths for the rover to traverse, then uses the Approximate Clearance Evaluation (ACE) algorithm to evaluate whether…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) technology can reduce user latency and energy consumption by offloading computationally intensive tasks to the edge servers. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology…
This paper proposes a finite-horizon optimal control strategy for set-point tracking using a nonlinear model predictive control framework with integrated avoidance capabilities. The formulation employs a smooth point-to-cloud distance…
Full autonomy for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires the capability to autonomously detect potential landing sites in unknown and unstructured terrain, allowing for self-governed mission completion or handling of emergency…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability provides formal safety guarantees for dynamical systems, but solving high-dimensional HJ partial differential equations limits its use in real-time planning. This paper presents a contingency-aware…
In this paper, a method to detect environmental hazards related to a fall risk using a mobile vision system is proposed. First-person perspective videos are proposed to provide objective evidence on cause and circumstances of perturbed…