Rover localization is one of the perquisites for large scale rover exploration. In NASA's Mars 2020 mission, the Ingenuity helicopter is carried together with the rover, which is capable of obtaining high-resolution imagery of Mars terrain, and it is possible to perform localization based on aerial-to-ground (A2G) imagery correspondence. However, considering the low-texture nature of the Mars terrain, and large perspective changes between UAV and rover imagery, traditional image matching methods will struggle to obtain valid image correspondence. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for Mars rover localization. An algorithm combing image-based rock detection and rock distribution pattern matching is used to acquire A2G imagery correspondence, thus establishing the rover position in a UAV-generated ground map. Feasibility of this method is evaluated on sample data from a Mars analogue environment. The proposed method can serve as a reliable assist in future Mars missions.
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究实验室）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory（喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
We consider the problem of rover relocalization in the context of the notional Mars Sample Return campaign. In this campaign, a rover (R1) needs to be capable of autonomously navigating and localizing itself within an area of approximately 50 x 50 m using reference images collected years earlier by another rover (R0). We propose a visual localizer that exhibits robustness to the relatively barren terrain that we expect to find in relevant areas, and to large lighting and viewpoint differences between R0 and R1. The localizer synthesizes partial renderings of a mesh built from reference R0 imag…
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；OPAL AI INC.（OPAL人工智能公司）
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 planetary surface exploration such as: planetary geology, simulated navigation and shape analysis. Although there exist different methods to enable a 3D reconstruction of Mars' surface, they rely on classical computer graphics techniques that incur high amounts of computational resources during the reconstruction process, and have limitations with generaliz…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Contrastive learning has recently demonstrated superior performance to supervised learning, despite requiring no training labels. We explore how contrastive learning can be applied to hundreds of thousands of unlabeled Mars terrain images, collected from the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Such methods are appealing since the vast majority of Mars images are unlabeled as manual annotation is labor intensive and requires extensive domain knowledge. Contrastive learning, however, assumes that any given pair of distinct images contain distinct sem…
North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Planetary rover missions must utilize machine learning-based perception to continue extra-terrestrial exploration with little to no human presence. Martian terrain segmentation has been critical for rover navigation and hazard avoidance to perform further exploratory tasks, e.g. soil sample collection and searching for organic compounds. Current Martian terrain segmentation models require a large amount of labeled data to achieve acceptable performance, and also require retraining for deployment across different domains, i.e. different rover missions, or different tasks, i.e. geological identi…
Universidad de Málaga（马拉加大学）；Andalucía Tech（安达卢西亚理工大学）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）
The goal of the Mars Sample Return campaign is to collect soil samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for further study. The samples will be acquired and stored in metal tubes by the Perseverance rover and deposited on the Martian surface. As part of this campaign, it is expected that the Sample Fetch Rover will be in charge of localizing and gathering up to 35 sample tubes over 150 Martian sols. Autonomous capabilities are critical for the success of the overall campaign and for the Sample Fetch Rover in particular. This work proposes a novel system architecture for the aut…
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. Existing approaches to label Martian terrain either involve the use of non-expert annotators producing taxonomies of limited granularity (e.g. soil, sand, bedrock, float rock, etc.), or rely on generic class discovery approaches that tend to produce perceptual classes such as rover parts and landscape, which are irrelevant to geologic analysis. Expert-labeled d…
In this paper, a novel method is proposed to extract rocks from Martian surface images by using 8 data field. It models the interaction between two pixels of an image in the context of imagery 9 characteristics. First, foreground rocks are differed from background information by binarizing 10 image on roughly partitioned images. Second, foreground rocks are grouped into clusters by 11 locating the centers and edges of clusters in data field via hierarchical grids. Third, the target 12 rocks are discovered for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) to keep healthy paths. The 13 experiment with images…
Khalifa University（哈利法大学）；Khalifa University of Science and Technology（哈利法科技大学）
Space exploration has witnessed revolutionary changes upon landing of the Perseverance Rover on the Martian surface and demonstrating the first flight beyond Earth by the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity. During their mission on Mars, Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity collaboratively explore the Martian surface, where Ingenuity scouts terrain information for rover's safe traversability. Hence, determining the relative poses between both the platforms is of paramount importance for the success of this mission. Driven by this necessity, this work proposes a robust relative localization system based on …
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（喷气推进实验室，加州理工学院）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Planetary rover systems need to perform terrain segmentation to identify drivable areas as well as identify specific types of soil for sample collection. The latest Martian terrain segmentation methods rely on supervised learning which is very data hungry and difficult to train where only a small number of labeled samples are available. Moreover, the semantic classes are defined differently for different applications (e.g., rover traversal vs. geological) and as a result the network has to be trained from scratch each time, which is an inefficient use of resources. This research proposes a sem…
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 images from the planet Mars. In order to improve the degree of automation and thus efficiency in this process, we propose a system for planetary rovers to actively search for prominence of prespecified scientific features in captured images. Scientists can prespecify such search tasks in natural language and upload them to a rover, on which the deployed syst…
The Mars Perseverance rover applies computer vision for navigation and hazard avoidance. The challenge to do onboard object recognition highlights the need for low-power, customized training, often including low-contrast backgrounds. We investigate deep learning methods for the classification and detection of Martian rocks. We report greater than 97% accuracy for binary classifications (rock vs. rover). We fine-tune a detector to render geo-located bounding boxes while counting rocks. For these models to run on microcontrollers, we shrink and quantize the neural networks' weights and demonstra…
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 environment. We use this system continuously throughout the day, when picking something up, or walking around while avoiding bumping into objects. Equipping robots with such capabilities will help produce more intelligent locomotion with the ability to more easily understand their surroundings and to move safely. In particular, such capabilities are desirable for…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory（美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室）
While innovations in scientific instrumentation have pushed the boundaries of Mars rover mission capabilities, the increase in data complexity has pressured Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and future Mars rover operations staff to quickly analyze complex data sets to meet progressively shorter tactical and strategic planning timelines. MSLWEB is an internal data tracking tool used by operations staff to perform first pass analysis on MSL image sequences, a series of products taken by the Mast camera, Mastcam. Mastcam's multiband multispectral image sequences require more complex analysis compare…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
We present MLNav, a learning-enhanced path planning framework for safety-critical and resource-limited systems operating in complex environments, such as rovers navigating on Mars. MLNav makes judicious use of machine learning to enhance the efficiency of path planning while fully respecting safety constraints. In particular, the dominant computational cost in such safety-critical settings is running a model-based safety checker on the proposed paths. Our learned search heuristic can simultaneously predict the feasibility for all path options in a single run, and the model-based safety checker…
Opening the Black Box of 3D Reconstruction Error Analysis with VECTOR
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Wētā FX（维塔数码）；Art Center College of Design（艺术中心设计学院）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory（喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
In the future, extraterrestrial expeditions will not only be conducted by rovers but also by flying robots. The technical demonstration drone Ingenuity, that just landed on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era of exploration unhindered by terrain traversability. Robust self-localization is crucial for that. Cameras that are lightweight, cheap and information-rich sensors are already used to estimate the ego-motion of vehicles. However, methods proven to work in man-made environments cannot simply be deployed on other planets. The highly repetitive textures present in the wastelands of Ma…
