Related papers: LunarLoc: Segment-Based Global Localization on the…
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…
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…
The ability to determine the pose of a rover in an inertial frame autonomously is a crucial capability necessary for the next generation of surface rover missions on other planetary bodies. Currently, most on-going rover missions utilize…
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…
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…
Global localization is a critical problem in autonomous navigation, enabling precise positioning without reliance on GPS. Modern global localization techniques often depend on dense LiDAR maps, which, while precise, require extensive…
Accurate and real-time 6-DoF localization is mission-critical for autonomous lunar landing, yet existing approaches remain limited: visual odometry (VO) drifts unboundedly, while map-based absolute localization fails in texture-sparse or…
NASA's forthcoming Lunar Gateway space station, which will be uncrewed most of the time, will need to operate with an unprecedented level of autonomy. One key challenge is enabling the Canadarm3, the Gateway's external robotic system, to…
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…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) visual localization in planetary aims to estimate the absolute pose of the UAV in the world coordinate system through satellite maps and images captured by on-board cameras. However, since planetary scenes…
To address the need for robust positioning, navigation, and timing services in lunar environments, this paper proposes a novel fault detection framework for satellite constellations using inter-satellite ranging (ISR). Traditionally,…
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…
Astronaut photography, spanning six decades of human spaceflight, presents a unique Earth observations dataset with immense value for both scientific research and disaster response. Despite its significance, accurately localizing the…
Recent years have seen significant improvement in absolute camera pose estimation, paving the way for pervasive markerless Augmented Reality (AR). However, accurate absolute pose estimation techniques are computation- and storage-heavy,…
Visual localization is crucial for Computer Vision and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, where determining the camera or device's position and orientation is essential to accurately interact with the physical environment. Traditional…
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…
Reliable localization is critical for robot navigation, yet most existing systems implicitly assume that all viewing directions at a location are equally informative. In practice, localization becomes unreliable when the robot observes…
LiDAR-based localization serves as a critical component in autonomous systems, yet existing approaches face persistent challenges in balancing repeatability, accuracy, and environmental adaptability. Traditional point cloud registration…
The visuomotor system of any animal is critical for its survival, and the development of a complex one within humans is large factor in our success as a species on Earth. This system is an essential part of our ability to adapt to our…
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robot autonomy. A major limitation, however, is that during exploration robots oftentimes have to rely on on-board systems alone for state estimation, accumulating significant drift over time in large…