Related papers: Stochastic Hazard Detection For Landing Under Topo…

Onboard terrain sensing and mapping for safe planetary landings often suffer from missed hazardous features, e.g., small rocks, due to the large observational range and the limited resolution of the obtained terrain data. To this end, this…

Hazard detection is critical for enabling autonomous landing on planetary surfaces. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage traditional computer vision approaches to automate the identification of safe terrain from input digital elevation…

The next generation of Mars rotorcrafts requires on-board autonomous hazard avoidance landing. To this end, this work proposes a system that performs continuous multi-resolution height map reconstruction and safe landing spot detection.…

Safely landing on the lunar surface is a challenging task, especially in the heavily-shadowed South Pole region where traditional vision-based hazard detection methods are not reliable. The potential existence of valuable resources at the…

Robotic and human lunar landings are a focus of future NASA missions. Precision landing capabilities are vital to guarantee the success of the mission, and the safety of the lander and crew. During the approach to the surface there are…

Hazard detection and avoidance is a key technology for future robotic small body sample return and lander missions. Current state-of-the-practice methods rely on high-fidelity, a priori terrain maps, which require extensive…

With autonomous aerial vehicles enacting safety-critical missions, such as the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover's landing on Mars, the tasks of automatically identifying and reasoning about potentially hazardous landing sites is…

We propose a new method for autonomous navigation in uneven terrains by utilizing a sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) based local perception model. The SGP local perception model is trained on local ranging observation (pointcloud) to learn the…

This paper introduces a novel motion planning algorithm for stochastic scenarios. We extend the concept of a navigation function to such scenarios. Our main idea is to consider both the Gaussian distribution probabilities of the players'…

This paper considers the design of tunable decision schemes capable of rejecting with high probability mismatched signals embedded in Gaussian interference with unknown covariance matrix. To this end, a sparse recovery technique is…

Stochastic dynamical systems have emerged as fundamental models across numerous application domains, providing powerful mathematical representations for capturing uncertain system behavior. In this paper, we address the problem of runtime…

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…

We present an efficient algorithm to compute tight upper bounds of collision probability between two objects with positional uncertainties, whose error distributions are represented with non-Gaussian forms. Our approach can handle noisy…

Autonomous robots operating in unstructured, safety-critical environments, from planetary exploration to warehouses and homes, must learn to safely navigate and interact with their surroundings despite limited prior knowledge. Current…

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic approach to risk assessment of robot systems by focusing on the impact of uncertainties. While various approaches to identifying systematic hazards (e.g., bugs, design flaws, etc.) can be found in…

Motion planning under sensing uncertainty is critical for robots in unstructured environments to guarantee safety for both the robot and any nearby humans. Most work on planning under uncertainty does not scale to high-dimensional robots…

This paper proposes a novel approach to robust radar detection of range-spread targets embedded in Gaussian noise with unknown covariance matrix. The idea is to model the useful target echo in each range cell as the sum of a coherent signal…

In this paper, a simple technique for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) potential landing site detection using terrain information through identification of flat areas, is presented. The algorithm utilizes digital elevation models (DEM) that…

We study the safety verification problem for discrete-time stochastic systems. We propose an approach for safety verification termed set-erosion strategy that verifies the safety of a stochastic system on a safe set through the safety of…

This paper addresses the adaptive radar target detection problem in the presence of Gaussian interference with unknown statistical properties. To this end, the problem is first formulated as a binary hypothesis test, and then we derive a…