Related papers: ShadowNav: Autonomous Global Localization for Luna…
There has been an increase in interest in missions that drive significantly longer distances per day than what has currently been performed. Further, some of these proposed missions require autonomous driving and absolute localization in…
The Artemis program requires robotic and crewed lunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, construction and maintenance of facilities, and human exploration. These rovers must support navigation for 10s of kilometers (km) from…
Onboard localization capabilities for planetary rovers to date have used relative navigation, by integrating combinations of wheel odometry, visual odometry, and inertial measurements during each drive to track position relative to the…
Global localization is necessary for autonomous operations on the lunar surface where traditional Earth-based navigation infrastructure, such as GPS, is unavailable. As NASA advances toward sustained lunar presence under the Artemis…
We present a modular, full-stack autonomy system for lunar surface navigation and mapping developed for the Lunar Autonomy Challenge. Operating in a GNSS-denied, visually challenging environment, our pipeline integrates semantic…
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…
In order to make a pinpoint landing on the Moon, the spacecraft's navigation system must be accurate. To achieve the desired accuracy, navigational drift caused by the inertial sensors must be corrected. One way to correct this drift is to…
With the complexity of lunar exploration missions, the moon needs to have a higher level of autonomy. Environmental perception and navigation algorithms are the foundation for lunar rovers to achieve autonomous exploration. The development…
Autonomous spacecraft relative navigation technology has been planned for and applied to many famous space missions. The development of on-board electronics systems has enabled the use of vision-based and LiDAR-based methods to achieve…
Autonomous terrain classification is an important problem in planetary navigation, whether the goal is to identify scientific sites of interest or to traverse treacherous areas safely. Past Martian rovers have relied on human operators to…
Autonomous aerial navigation in absolute darkness is crucial for post-disaster search and rescue operations, which often occur from disaster-zone power outages. Yet, due to resource constraints, tiny aerial robots, perfectly suited for…
Autonomous operation of UAVs in a closed environment requires precise and reliable pose estimate that can stabilize the UAV without using external localization systems such as GNSS. In this work, we are concerned with estimating the pose…
The Moon is a primary focus of space exploration. Current navigation methods face significant limitations in providing precise location data for lunar missions. In particular, existing methods often require direct Line of Sight to Earth,…
The Lunar landing has drawn great interest in lunar exploration in recent years, and autonomous lunar landing navigation is fundamental to this task. AI is expected to play a critical role in autonomous and intelligent space missions, yet…
Future lunar missions will require autonomous rovers capable of traversing tens of kilometers across challenging terrain while maintaining accurate localization and producing globally consistent maps. However, the absence of global…
Reliable robot pose estimation is a key building block of many robot autonomy pipelines, with LiDAR localization being an active research domain. In this work, a versatile self-supervised LiDAR odometry estimation method is presented, in…
Establishing lunar infrastructure is paramount to long-term habitation on the Moon. To meet the demand for future lunar infrastructure development, we present CraterGrader, a novel system for autonomous robotic earthmoving tasks within…
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,…
Because of the communication delay between earth and moon, the GNC technology of lunar probe is becoming more important than ever. Current navigation technology is not able to provide precise motion estimation for probe landing control…
The NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has returned petabytes of lunar high spatial resolution surface imagery over the past decade, impractical for humans to fully review manually. Here we develop an automated method using a deep…