Related papers: Daedalus 2: Autorotation Entry, Descent and Landin…
The Daedalus 2 mission aboard REXUS 29 is a technology demonstrator for an alternative descent mechanism for very high altitude drops based on auto-rotation. It consists of two probes that are ejected from a sounding rocket at an altitude…
During the 1970s members of the British Interplanetary Society embarked on a landmark theoretical engineering design study to send a probe to Barnard's star. Project Daedalus was a two-stage vehicle employing electron beam driven inertial…
Existing spacecraft rendezvous and docking control methods largely rely on predefined dynamic models and often exhibit limited robustness in realistic on-orbit environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Imitation…
Mid-Air Deployment (MAD) of a rotorcraft during Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) on Mars eliminates the need to carry a propulsion or airbag landing system. This reduces the total mass inside the aeroshell by more than 100 kg and simplifies…
A close partnership between people and partially autonomous machines has enabled decades of space exploration. But to further expand our horizons, our systems must become more capable. Increasing the nature and degree of autonomy - allowing…
Multi-rotor UAVs suffer from a restricted range and flight duration due to limited battery capacity. Autonomous landing on a 2D moving platform offers the possibility to replenish batteries and offload data, thus increasing the utility of…
Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to…
Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort contributes to NASA's Concepts for Ocean worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program, which explores science platform technologies for ocean worlds…
An intelligent driving system should dynamically formulate appropriate driving strategies based on the current environment and vehicle status while ensuring system security and reliability. However, methods based on reinforcement learning…
Scaling up robotic imitation learning for real-world applications requires efficient and scalable demonstration collection methods. While teleoperation is effective, it depends on costly and inflexible robot platforms. In-the-wild…
Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer…
Rocket recycling is a crucial pursuit in aerospace technology, aimed at reducing costs and environmental impact in space exploration. The primary focus centers on rocket landing control, involving the guidance of a nonlinear underactuated…
Due to the high performance and safety requirements of self-driving applications, the complexity of modern autonomous driving systems (ADS) has been growing, instigating the need for more sophisticated hardware which could add to the energy…
We propose UAD, a method for vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD), achieving the best open-loop evaluation performance in nuScenes, meanwhile showing robust closed-loop driving quality in CARLA. Our motivation stems from the…
Extended time-delay auto-synchronization (ETDAS) is a promising technique for stabilizing unstable periodic orbits in low-dimensional dynamical systems. The technique involves continuous feedback of signals delayed by multiples of the…
Landing robotic spacecrafts and humans on Mars has become one of the inevitable technological necessities for humans. Effectuating perfect Mars expedition requires landing of enormous cargoes, crewed modules, ascent vehicles, and scientific…
Many unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance and monitoring applications require observations at precise locations over long periods of time, ideally days or weeks at a time (e.g. ecosystem monitoring), which has been impractical due to…
Despite the rapid technological progress, autonomous vehicles still face a wide range of complex driving situations that require human intervention. Teleoperation technology offers a versatile and effective way to address these challenges.…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly prominence in recent years, finding applications in surveillance, package delivery, among many others. Despite considerable efforts in developing algorithms that enable UAVs to…
Autonomous exploration of subterranean environments constitutes a major frontier for robotic systems as underground settings present key challenges that can render robot autonomy hard to achieve. This has motivated the DARPA Subterranean…