Related papers: Natural Language-Driven Global Mapping of Martian …
Data-driven approaches like deep learning are rapidly advancing planetary science, particularly in Mars exploration. Despite recent progress, most existing benchmarks remain confined to closed-set supervised visual tasks and do not support…
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in earth observation (EO), yet they struggle with tasks that require grounding complex spatial reasoning in precise pixel-level visual representations. To address this problem, we introduce…
The aim of this work is to introduce MaRF, a novel framework able to synthesize the Martian environment using several collections of images from rover cameras. The idea is to generate a 3D scene of Mars' surface to address key challenges in…
Grounding language to the visual observations of a navigating agent can be performed using off-the-shelf visual-language models pretrained on Internet-scale data (e.g., image captions). While this is useful for matching images to natural…
Mars exploration requires precise and reliable terrain models to ensure safe rover navigation across its unpredictable and often hazardous landscapes. Stereoscopic vision serves a critical role in the rover's perception, allowing scene…
This paper presents a novel method for qualitative mapping of large scale spaces. The proposed framework makes use of a graphical representation of the world in order to build a map consisting of qualitative constraints on the geometric…
Planetary exploration missions with Mars rovers are complicated, which generally require elaborated task planning by human experts, from the path to take to the images to capture. NASA has been using this process to acquire over 22 million…
Applying Gaussian Splatting to perception tasks for 3D scene understanding is becoming increasingly popular. Most existing works primarily focus on rendering 2D feature maps from novel viewpoints, which leads to an imprecise 3D language…
Foundation models have enabled rapid progress across many specialized domains by leveraging large-scale pre-training on unlabeled data, demonstrating strong generalization to a variety of downstream tasks. While such models have gained…
Recent advances in vision-language models have made zero-shot navigation feasible, enabling robots to follow natural language instructions without requiring labeling. However, existing methods that explicitly store language vectors in grid…
An in-depth comprehension of global land cover is essential in Earth observation, forming the foundation for a multitude of applications. Although remote sensing technology has advanced rapidly, leading to a proliferation of satellite…
Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of…
The NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) hosts millions of images of planets, moons, and other bodies collected throughout many missions. The ever-expanding nature of data and user engagement demands an interpretable content classification…
Automatic terrain recognition in Mars rover images is an important problem not just for navigation, but for scientists interested in studying rock types, and by extension, conditions of the ancient Martian paleoclimate and habitability.…
We present a method for image-guided exploration for mobile robotic systems. Our approach extends ergodic exploration methods, a recent exploration approach that prioritizes complete coverage of a space, with the use of a learned image…
Geometrically accurate and semantically expressive map representations have proven invaluable for robot deployment and task planning in unknown environments. Nevertheless, real-time, open-vocabulary semantic understanding of large-scale…
Humans use spatial language to naturally describe object locations and their relations. Interpreting spatial language not only adds a perceptual modality for robots, but also reduces the barrier of interfacing with humans. Previous work…
Lossy image compression is essential for Mars exploration missions, due to the limited bandwidth between Earth and Mars. However, the compression may introduce visual artifacts that complicate the geological analysis of the Martian surface.…
Semantic maps allow a robot to reason about its surroundings to fulfill tasks such as navigating known environments, finding specific objects, and exploring unmapped areas. Traditional mapping approaches provide accurate geometric…
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…