Related papers: Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator …

Future planetary exploration missions will require reaching challenging regions such as craters and steep slopes. Such regions are ubiquitous and present science-rich targets potentially containing information regarding the planet's…

The European Space Agency (ESA), driven by its ambitions on planned lunar missions with the Argonaut lander, has a profound interest in reliable crater detection, since craters pose a risk to safe lunar landings. This task is usually…

This paper presents a modular in-pipeline climbing robot with a novel compliant foldable OmniCrawler mechanism. The circular cross-section of the OmniCrawler module enables a holonomic motion to facilitate the alignment of the robot in the…

Non-prehensile manipulation using onboard sensing presents a fundamental challenge: the manipulated object occludes the sensor's field of view, creating occluded regions that can lead to collisions. We propose CURA-PPO, a reinforcement…

My research objective is to explicitly bridge the gap between high computational performance and low power dissipation of robot on-board hardware by designing a bio-inspired tapered whisker neuromorphic computing (also called reservoir…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising field to enhance robotic autonomy and decision making capabilities for space robotics, something which is challenging with traditional techniques due to stochasticity and uncertainty within the…

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…

In lunar and planetary exploration, legged robots have attracted significant attention as an alternative to conventional wheeled robots, which struggle to traverse rough and uneven terrain. To enable locomotion over highly irregular and…

Robotic exploration in extreme environments such as caves, oceans, and planetary surfaces pose significant challenges, particularly in locomotion across diverse terrains. Conventional wheeled or legged robots often struggle in these…

A Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is a tethered underwater robot used for tasks like inspection and intervention. While essential tools for underwater science, the high cost of commercial ROVs and a persistent gap between mechanically…

The sewer inspection robot MAKRO is an autonomous multi-segment robot with worm-like shape driven by wheels. It is currently under development in the project MAKRO-PLUS. The robot has to navigate autonomously within sewer systems. Its first…

In this work, we propose the use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) for rover localization on Mars. Precise pose estimation is an important task for mobile robots exploring planetary surfaces, as they operate in GPS-denied environments.…

Moon Zoo is a citizen science project that utilises internet crowd-sourcing techniques. Moon Zoo users are asked to review high spatial resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), onboard NASAs LRO spacecraft, and…

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…

Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve…

In this paper, a control approach called Artificial Neural Tissue (ANT) is applied to multirobot excavation for lunar base preparation tasks including clearing landing pads and burying of habitat modules. We show for the first time, a team…

A terrestrial robot that can maneuver rough terrain and scout places is very useful in mapping out unknown areas. It can also be used explore dangerous areas in place of humans. A terrestrial robot modeled after a scorpion will be able to…

Wheeled rovers have been the primary choice for lunar exploration due to their speed and efficiency. However, deeper areas, such as lunar caves and craters, require the mobility of legged robots. To do so, appropriate end effectors must be…

The field of exoplanets has rapidly expanded from the exclusivity of exoplanet detection to include exoplanet characterization. A key step towards this characterization will be retrieval of planetary albedos and rotation rates from highly…

This paper presents a time-efficient scheme for Mars exploration by the cooperation of multiple drones and a rover. To maximize effective coverage of the Mars surface in the long run, a comprehensive framework has been developed with joint…