Related papers: Small Celestial Body Exploration with CubeSat Swar…
The rapid advancement and miniaturization of spacecraft electronics, sensors, actuators, and power systems have resulted in growing proliferation of small-spacecraft. Coupled with this is the growing number of rocket launches, with…
A deep-space exploration mission with low-thrust propulsion to rendezvous with multiple asteroids is investigated. Indirect methods, based on the optimal control theory, are implemented to optimize the fuel consumption. The application of…
Robot swarms have been shown to improve the ability of individual robots by inter-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present the PuzzleBots - a low-cost robotic swarm system where robots can physically couple with each other to form…
The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…
A key requirement in robotics is the ability to simultaneously self-localize and map a previously unknown environment, relying primarily on onboard sensing and computation. Achieving fully onboard accurate simultaneous localization and…
Numerical simulations play a key important role in modern cosmology. Examples are plenty including the cosmic web - large scale structure of the distribution of galaxies in space - which was first observed in N-body simulations and later…
Asteroids and other Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs) are of high general and scientific interest in many aspects. The origin, formation, and evolution of our Solar System (and other planetary systems) can be better understood by analysing…
We discuss the in-flight autonomous assembly as the means to build advanced planetary science payloads to explore the outer regions of the solar system. These payloads are robotically constructed from modular parts delivered by a group of…
Distributed sensing by cooperative drone swarms is crucial for several Smart City applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response. Using an indoor lab with inexpensive drones, a testbed supports complex and ambitious studies…
Machine learning, and eventually true artificial intelligence techniques, are extremely important advancements in astrophysics and astronomy. We explore the application of deep learning using neural networks in order to automate the…
Modern redshift surveys enable the identification of large samples of galaxies in pairs, taken from many different environments. Meanwhile, cosmological simulations allow a detailed understanding of the statistical properties of the…
The StarLight program conceptualizes fast interstellar travel via small wafer satellites (wafersats) that are propelled by directed energy. This process is wildly different from traditional space travel and trades large and slow spacecraft…
The wide availability of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) electronics that can withstand Low Earth Orbit conditions has opened avenue for wide deployment of CubeSats and small-satellites. CubeSats thanks to their low developmental and launch…
One of the greatest challenge facing current space weather monitoring operations is forecasting the arrival of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs) within their Earth-Sun propagation timescales. Current…
Robot swarms can effectively serve a variety of sensing and inspection applications. Certain inspection tasks require a binary classification decision. This work presents an experimental setup for a surface inspection task based on…
Recent miniaturization of electronics in very small, low-cost and low-power configurations suitable for use in spacecraft have inspired innovative small-scale satellite concepts, such as ChipSats, centimeter-scale satellites with a mass of…
Since the 1980's it has been becoming increasingly clear that the Solar System's irregular satellites are collisionally evolved. We derive a general model for the collisional evolution of an irregular satellite swarm and apply it to the…
In planning for future human space exploration, it is important to consider how to design for uplifting interpersonal communications and social dynamics among crew members. What if embodied social robots could help to improve the overall…
The Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on the {\it Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope}, for the first time, detected a short gamma ray burst (SGRB) signal that accompanies a gravitational wave signal GW170817 in 2017. The detection and localization…
Understanding the physics of large cosmological surveys down to small (nonlinear) scales will significantly improve our knowledge of the Universe. Large N-body simulations have been built to obtain predictions in the non-linear regime.…