Related papers: Planetary Exploration 3.0: A Roadmap for Software-…
Autonomous robots operating in unstructured, safety-critical environments, from planetary exploration to warehouses and homes, must learn to safely navigate and interact with their surroundings despite limited prior knowledge. Current…
An unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) is sent on a mission to explore and reconstruct an unknown environment from a series of measurements collected by Bayesian optimization. The success of the mission is judged by the UAV's ability to…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
Definition of habitability depends on the organisms under consideration. One way to determine habitability of some environment is to compare its certain parameters to environments where extremophilic micro-organisms thrive on Earth. We can…
Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…
In this article, we introduce a novel strategy for robotic exploration in unknown environments using a semantic topometric map. As it will be presented, the semantic topometric map is generated by segmenting the grid map of the currently…
More than 30 years have passed since the Voyager 2 fly-bys of Uranus and Neptune. I discuss a range of lessons learned from Voyager, broadly grouped into process, planning, and people. In terms of process, we must be open to new concepts:…
There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions in the Main Belt. They are diverse in physical properties and composition and are time capsules of the early solar system. This makes them strategic locations for planetary…
While recently discovered exotic new planet-types have both challenged our imaginations and broadened our knowledge of planetary system workings, perhaps the most compelling objective of exoplanet science is to detect and characterize…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
As space exploration advances, underground environments are becoming increasingly attractive due to their potential to provide shelter, easier access to resources, and enhanced scientific opportunities. Although such environments exist on…
In the expeditionary sciences, spatiotemporally varying environments -- hydrothermal plumes, algal blooms, lava flows, or animal migrations -- are ubiquitous. Mobile robots are uniquely well-suited to study these dynamic, mesoscale natural…
We present a method for solving the coverage problem with the objective of autonomously exploring an unknown environment under mission time constraints. Here, the robot is tasked with planning a path over a horizon such that the accumulated…
Goal 1 of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Exoplanet Science Strategy is "to understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems as products of the process of star formation, and characterize and…
Reliable real-time trajectory generation is essential for future autonomous spacecraft. While recent progress in nonconvex guidance and control is paving the way for onboard autonomous trajectory optimization, these methods still rely on…
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Space Resources Innovation Centre (ESRIC) created the Space Resources Challenge to invite researchers and companies to propose innovative solutions for Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) space…
The Cosmic Shoreline concept was introduced as a way to separate planets with and without atmosphere, based on the relationship between the cumulative instellation and the escape velocity observed in the Solar System. The exoplanet…
We advocate for the realization of volatile sample return from various destinations including: small bodies, the Moon, Mars, ocean worlds/satellites, and plumes. As part of recent mission studies (e.g., Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple…
Endurance is a mission concept to explore and ultimately return samples from the Moon's largest and oldest impact basin, South Pole-Aitken (SPA). SPA holds the answers to many outstanding planetary science questions, including the earliest…
While there have been far fewer missions to the outer Solar System than to the inner Solar System, spacecraft destined for the giant planets have conducted a wide range of fundamental investigations, returning data that continues to reshape…