Hazard detection and avoidance is a key technology for future robotic small body sample return and lander missions. Current state-of-the-practice methods rely on high-fidelity, a priori terrain maps, which require extensive human-in-the-loop verification and expensive reconnaissance campaigns to resolve mapping uncertainties. We propose a novel safety mapping paradigm that leverages deep semantic segmentation techniques to predict landing safety directly from a single monocular image, thus reducing reliance on high-fidelity, a priori data products. We demonstrate precise and accurate safety mapping performance on real in-situ imagery of prospective sample sites from the OSIRIS-REx mission.
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
The detection of hazardous terrain during the planetary landing of spacecraft plays a critical role in assuring vehicle safety and mission success. A cheap and effective way of detecting hazardous terrain is through the use of visual cameras, which ensure operational ability from atmospheric entry through touchdown. Plagued by resource constraints and limited computational power, traditional techniques for visual hazardous terrain detection focus on template matching and registration to pre-built hazard maps. Although successful on previous missions, this approach is restricted to the specific…
Mila - Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Université de Montréal（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所，蒙特利尔大学）；Alternova Tech SAS（Alternova科技公司）；Universidad Autónoma de Occidente（西部自治大学）
Autonomous landing is a capability that is essential to achieve the full potential of multi-rotor drones in many social and industrial applications. The implementation and testing of this capability on physical platforms is risky and resource-intensive; hence, in order to ensure both a sound design process and a safe deployment, simulations are required before implementing a physical prototype. This paper presents the development of a monocular visual system, using a software-in-the-loop methodology, that autonomously and efficiently lands a quadcopter drone on a predefined landing pad, thus r…
A Multimodal Large Language Model-Driven Framework for Context-Aware UAV Emergency Landing Site Selection
School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University（信息科学与工程学院，东南大学）；LASER, International Digital Economy Academy（LASER，国际数字经济学院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University（电子工程系，华东师范大学）
Robotic and human lunar landings are a focus of future NASA missions. Precision landing capabilities are vital to guarantee the success of the mission, and the safety of the lander and crew. During the approach to the surface there are multiple challenges associated with Hazard Relative Navigation to ensure safe landings. This paper will focus on a passive autonomous hazard detection and avoidance sub-system to generate an initial assessment of possible landing regions for the guidance system. The system uses a single camera and the MobileNetV2 neural network architecture to detect and discern…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）
The next generation of Mars rotorcrafts requires on-board autonomous hazard avoidance landing. To this end, this work proposes a system that performs continuous multi-resolution height map reconstruction and safe landing spot detection. Structure-from-Motion measurements are aggregated in a pyramid structure using a novel Optimal Mixture of Gaussians formulation that provides a comprehensive uncertainty model. Our multiresolution pyramid is built more efficiently and accurately than past work by decoupling pyramid filling from the measurement updates of different resolutions. To detect the saf…
In early 2022, Intuitive Machines' NOVA-C Lander will touch down on the lunar surface becoming the first commercial endeavor to visit a celestial body. NOVA-C will deliver six payloads to the lunar surface with various scientific and engineering objectives, ushering in a new era of commercial space exploration and utilization. However, to safely accomplish the mission, the NOVA-C lander must ensure its landing site is free of hazards larger than 30 cm and the slope of local terrain at touchdown is less than 10 degrees off vertical. To accomplish this, NOVA-C utilizes Intuitive Machines' precis…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to be used for many applications in urban environments. However, allowing UAVs to fly above densely populated areas raises concerns regarding safety. One of the main safety issues is the possibility for a failure to cause the loss of navigation capabilities, which can result in the UAV falling/landing in hazardous areas such as busy roads, where it can cause fatal accidents. Current standards, such as the SORA published in 2019, do not consider applicable mitigation techniques to handle this kind of hazardous situations. Consequently, certifyi…
Fiducial systems provide a computationally cheap way for mobile robots to estimate the pose of objects, or their own pose, using just a monocular camera. However, the orientation component of the pose of fiducial markers is unreliable, which can have destructive effects in autonomous drone landing on landing pads marked with fiducial markers. This paper evaluates the April Tag and WhyCode fiducial systems in terms of orientation ambiguity and detection rate on embedded hardware. We test 2 April Tag variants - 1 default and 1 custom - and 3 Whycode variants - 1 default and 2 custom. We determin…
BlinkBud: Detecting Hazards from Behind via Sampled Monocular 3D Detection on a Single Earbud
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Southwest Petroleum University（西南石油大学）；Donghua University（东华大学）
