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In contrast to manned missions, the application of autonomous robots for space exploration missions decreases the safety concerns of the exploration missions while extending the exploration distance since returning transportation is not…
The successes of previous and current Mars rovers have encouraged space agencies worldwide to pursue additional planetary exploration missions with more ambitious navigation goals. For example, NASA's planned Mars Sample Return mission will…
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,…
Impact craters are among the most prominent geomorphological features on planetary surfaces and are of substantial significance in planetary science research. Their spatial distribution and morphological characteristics provide critical…
Pits on the Moon and Mars are intriguing geological formations that have yet to be explored. These geological formations can provide protection from harsh diurnal temperature variations, ionizing radiation, and meteorite impacts. Some have…
Marine exploration is essential to understanding ocean processes and organisms. While the use of current unmanned underwater vehicles has enabled many discoveries, there are still plenty of limitations toward exploring complex environments.…
We present an approach to enhance wheeled planetary rover dead-reckoning localization performance by leveraging the use of zero-type constraint equations in the navigation filter. Without external aiding, inertial navigation solutions…
Wheeled planetary rovers such as the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) have provided unprecedented, detailed images of the Mars surface. However, these rovers are large and are of high-cost as they need to…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
As humans venture deeper into space, the need for a lunar settlement, housing the first group of settlers, grows steadily. By means of new technologies such as in situ resource utilisation (ISRU) as well as computational design, this goal…
The next frontier in solar system exploration will be missions targeting extreme and rugged environments such as caves, canyons, cliffs and crater rims of the Moon, Mars and icy moons. These environments are time capsules into early…
In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…
This paper presents a soft-robotic platform for exploring the ecological relevance of non-locomotory movements via animal-robot interactions. Coral snakes (genus Micrurus) and their mimics use vigorous, non-locomotory, and arrhythmic…
This paper presents a novel 3D myopic coverage path planning algorithm for lunar micro-rovers that can explore unknown environments with limited sensing and computational capabilities. The algorithm expands upon traditional non-graph path…
Throughout its mission, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has often rolled about its along-track axis by up to 28{\deg} to partially compensate for the suboptimal location of the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) antenna along an edge of the…
Efficient representation of articulated objects such as human bodies is an important problem in computer vision and graphics. To efficiently simulate deformation, existing approaches represent 3D objects using polygonal meshes and deform…
In this report, we present the system design, operational strategy, and results of coordinated multi-vehicle field demonstrations of autonomous marine robotic technologies in search-for-life missions within the Pacific shelf margin of Costa…
Soft, growing vine robots are well-suited for exploring cluttered, unknown environments, and are theorized to be performant during structural collapse incidents caused by earthquakes, fires, explosions, and material flaws. These vine robots…
The modeling and simulation of heat source trajectories through phase-change materials is a relevant problem both for space exploration and for terrestrial climate research, among other fields. In space, the DLR and NASA are both interested…
This document presents the study conducted during the European Moon Rover System Pre-Phase A project, in which we have developed a lunar rover system, with a modular approach, capable of carrying out different missions with different…