Related papers: A Potential Aid in the Target Selection for the Co…
When performing manipulation-based activities such as picking objects, a mobile robot needs to position its base at a location that supports successful execution. To address this problem, prominent approaches typically rely on costly grasp…
The large number of new planets expected from wide-area transit surveys means that follow-up transmission spectroscopy studies of their atmospheres will be limited by the availability of telescope assets. We argue that telescopes covering a…
We develop an integrated guidance and control system that in conjunction with a stabilized seeker and landing site detection software can achieve precise and safe planetary landing. The seeker tracks the designated landing site by adjusting…
We focus on the task of object manipulation to an arbitrary goal pose, in which a robot is supposed to pick an assigned object to place at the goal position with a specific orientation. However, limited by the execution space of the…
Context. The ability to automatically select scientifically-important transient events from an alert stream of many such events, and to conduct follow-up observations in response, will become increasingly important in astronomy. With…
Interstellar comets arrive with key ingredients for deep-space platforms already in place: volatile inventories convertible to propellant, natural rotation providing continuous attitude variation, and hyperbolic trajectories that carry them…
Comets are considered a potential source of inner solar system volatiles, but the timing of this delivery relative to that of Earth's accretion is still poorly understood. Measurements of xenon isotopes in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko…
This paper addresses the problem of planning for a robot with a directional obstacle-detection sensor that must move through a cluttered environment. The planning objective is to remain safe by finding a path for the complete robot,…
The LOFT mission concept is one of four candidates selected by ESA for the M3 launch opportunity as Medium Size missions of the Cosmic Vision programme. The launch window is currently planned for between 2022 and 2024. LOFT is designed to…
In a few years the Kepler and TESS missions will provide ultra-precise photometry for thousands of RR Lyrae and hundreds of Cepheid stars. In the extended Kepler mission all targets are proposed in the Guest Observer (GO) Program, while the…
Occlusion is a long-standing problem that causes many modern tracking methods to be erroneous. In this paper, we address the occlusion problem by exploiting the current and future possible locations of the target object from its past…
Tracking-by-detection approaches are some of the most successful object trackers in recent years. Their success is largely determined by the detector model they learn initially and then update over time. However, under challenging…
Predicting the next pickup location of individual users is a fundamental problem in intelligent mobility systems, which requires modeling personalized travel behaviors under complex spatiotemporal contexts. Existing methods mainly learn…
In August 2019, a second interstellar object 2I/Borisov was discovered 2 years after the discovery of the first known interstellar object, 1I/'Oumuamua. Can we send a spacecraft to this object, using existing technologies? In this paper we…
We show that the estimates of close encounter of this comet with Mars depend on data treatment. Using the data taken in the two-year period, we derived that the comet will miss Mars on 2014 October 19 at the distance of about $140\,150\pm…
The recently discovered first high velocity hyperbolic objects passing through the Solar System, 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, have raised the question about near term missions to Interstellar Objects. In situ spacecraft exploration of these…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
K2 is the mission concept for a repurposed Kepler mission that uses two reaction wheels to maintain the satellite attitude and provide ~85 days of coverage for ten 105-deg^2 fields along the ecliptic in the first 2.5 years of operation. We…
We summarize the comet science provided by surveys. This includes surveys where the detections of comets are an advantageous benefit but were not part of the survey\'s original intent, as well as some pointed surveys where comet science was…
We present a method for scheduling observations in small field-of-view transient targeted surveys. The method is based on maximizing the probability of detection of transient events of a given type and age since occurrence; it requires…