Related papers: Martian Lava Tube Exploration Using Jumping Legged…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that can utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying or rolling can overcome these limitations.…
Mars is the only planet, other than Earth, for which there are several evidences that liquid water was abundant at the surface. Among them, one of the best evidence is that the ancient terrains of Mars are covered with fluvial and…
Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents a new design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs,…
Kick-starting the space economy requires identification of critical resources that can lower the cost of space transport, sustain logistic bases and communication relay networks between major nodes in the network. One important challenge…
Faced with strong demand for robots working in underwater pipeline environments, a novel underwater multi-model locomotion robot is designed and studied in this research. By mimicking the earthworm's metameric body, the robot is segmented…
Future missions to Mars and Venus will make use of aerobraking and aerocapture in order to gain mass through the saving of fuel at planetary arrival. So far only aerobraking has been demonstrated, if the Mars Premier project has paved the…
Mars, lacking an intrinsic dynamo, is an ideal laboratory to comparatively study induced magnetospheres, which can be found in other terrestrial bodies as well as comets. Additionally, Mars is of particular interest to further exploration…
NASA's SLS and Orion crew vehicle will launch humans to cislunar space to begin the new era of space exploration. NASA plans to use the Orion crew vehicle to transport humans between Earth and cislunar space where there will be a stationed…
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…
Legged locomotion holds the premise of universal mobility, a critical capability for many real-world robotic applications. Both model-based and learning-based approaches have advanced the field of legged locomotion in the past three…
Lunar exploration has become a key focus, driving scientific and technological advances. Ongoing missions are deploying rovers to the surface of the Moon, targeting the far side and south pole. However, these terrains pose challenges,…
Sample Exploring the ocean environment holds profound significance in areas such as resource exploration and ecological protection. Underwater robots struggle with extreme water pressure and often cause noise and damage to the underwater…
NASA and ESA are preparing a series of human exploration missions using the four-person Orion crew vehicle, launched by NASA's Space Launch System, and a Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) that enable long duration (>30 days)…
This paper presents the plan of an in-pipe climbing robot that works utilizing an astute transmission part to investigate complex relationship of lines. Standard wheeled/proceeded in-pipe climbing robots are inclined to slip and take while…
One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of…
In this paper, emerging deep learning techniques are leveraged to deal with Mars visual navigation problem. Specifically, to achieve precise landing and autonomous navigation, a novel deep neural network architecture with double branches…
The autonomous transportation of materials over challenging terrain is a challenge with major economic implications and remains unsolved. This paper introduces LEVA, a high-payload, high-mobility robot designed for autonomous logistics…
While deep learning has enabled significant progress in designing general purpose robot grasping systems, there remain objects which still pose challenges for these systems. Recent work on Exploratory Grasping has formalized the problem of…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
Efficient exploration strategies are vital in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions and disaster surveying. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become particularly popular in such applications, promising to cover large areas at high…