NASA's POLAR dataset contains approximately 2,600 pairs of high dynamic range stereo photos captured across 13 varied terrain scenarios, including areas with sparse or dense rock distributions, craters, and rocks of different sizes. The purpose of these photos is to spur development in robotics, AI-based perception, and autonomous navigation. Acknowledging a scarcity of lunar images from around the lunar poles, NASA Ames produced on Earth but in controlled conditions images that resemble rover operating conditions from these regions of the Moon. We report on the outcomes of an effort aimed at accomplishing two tasks. In Task 1, we provided bounding boxes and semantic segmentation information for all the images in NASA's POLAR dataset. This effort resulted in 23,000 labels and semantic segmentation annotations pertaining to rocks, shadows, and craters. In Task 2, we generated the digital twins of the 13 scenarios that have been used to produce all the photos in the POLAR dataset. Specifically, for each of these scenarios, we produced individual meshes, texture information, and material properties associated with the ground and the rocks in each scenario. This allows anyone with a camera model to synthesize images associated with any of the 13 scenarios of the POLAR dataset. Effectively, one can generate as many semantically labeled synthetic images as desired -- with different locations and exposure values in the scene, for different positions of the sun, with or without the presence of active illumination, etc. The benefit of this work is twofold. Using outcomes of Task 1, one can train and/or test perception algorithms that deal with Moon images. For Task 2, one can produce as much data as desired to train and test AI algorithms that are anticipated to work in lunar conditions. All the outcomes of this work are available in a public repository for unfettered use and distribution.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology(加州理工学院喷气推进实验室);NASA Ames Research Center(美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心)
The Artemis program requires robotic and crewed lunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, construction and maintenance of facilities, and human exploration. These rovers must support navigation for 10s of kilometers (km) from base camps. A lunar science rover mission concept - Endurance-A, has been recommended by the new Decadal Survey as the highest priority medium-class mission of the Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program, and would be required to traverse approximately 2000 km in the South Pole-Aitkin (SPA) Basin, with individual drives of several kilometers between stops fo…
We introduce a new real-time pipeline for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) in the context of planetary rovers. We leverage prior information of the location of the lander to propose an object-level SLAM approach that optimizes pose and shape of the lander together with camera trajectories of the rover. As a further refinement step, we propose to use techniques of interpolation between adjacent temporal samples; videlicet synthesizing non-existing images to improve the overall accuracy of the system. The experiments are conducted in the context of …
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology(加州理工学院喷气推进实验室)
Onboard localization capabilities for planetary rovers to date have used relative navigation, by integrating combinations of wheel odometry, visual odometry, and inertial measurements during each drive to track position relative to the start of each drive. At the end of each drive, a ground-in-the-loop (GITL) interaction is used to get a position update from human operators in a more global reference frame, by matching images or local maps from onboard the rover to orbital reconnaissance images or maps of a large region around the rover's current position. Autonomous rover drives are limited i…
Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment
The State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室);School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学人工智能学院);Beijing Aerospace Control Center(北京航天飞行控制中心);Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院空间应用工程与技术中心)
Depth-Aware Rover: A Study of Edge AI and Monocular Vision for Real-World Implementation
Space Applications Centre(空间应用中心);Institute of Advanced Indian Space Research(印度高级空间研究机构);Indian Space Research Organization(印度空间研究组织);Technology and Research(技术与研究)
Modularity for lunar exploration: European Moon Rover System Pre-Phase A Design and Field Test Campaign Results
GMV Aerospace and Defence SAU(GMV航空航天与防务SAU);GMV NSL Ltd(GMV NSL有限公司);AVS Added Value Solutions(AVV增值解决方案公司);OHB System AG(OHB系统股份公司);Hellenic Technology of Robotics(希腊机器人技术公司);German Aerospace Center (DLR)(德国航空航天中心);ESTEC, ESA(欧洲空间局欧洲空间研究和技术中心)
The European Moon Rover System: a modular multipurpose rover for future complex lunar missions
GMV Aerospace and Defence SAU(GMV航空航天与防务公司);GMV NSL Ltd(GMV NSL有限公司);AVS Added Value Solutions(AVS增值解决方案公司);OHB System AG(OHB系统股份公司);Hellenic Technology of Robotics(希腊机器人技术公司);German Aerospace Center (DLR)(德国航空航天中心);ESTEC, ESA(欧洲空间研究与技术中心)
BEVIO: Efficient Bird's-Eye-View based Sparse-Update Visual-Inertial Odometry for Lunar Day-Night Navigation
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology(喷气推进实验室,加州理工学院);Autonomous Robots Lab at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology(挪威科学技术大学自主机器人实验室)
Jet Propulsion Laboratory(喷气推进实验室);California Institute of Technology(加州理工学院)
There has been an increase in interest in missions that drive significantly longer distances per day than what has currently been performed. Further, some of these proposed missions require autonomous driving and absolute localization in darkness. For example, the Endurance A mission proposes to drive 1200km of its total traverse at night. The lack of natural light available during such missions limits what can be used as visual landmarks and the range at which landmarks can be observed. In order for planetary rovers to traverse long ranges, onboard absolute localization is critical to the abi…
Plans for establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon will require substantial increases in robot autonomy and multi-robot coordination to support establishing a lunar outpost. To achieve these objectives, algorithm design choices for the software developments need to be tested and validated for expected scenarios such as autonomous in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), localization in challenging environments, and multi-robot coordination. However, real-world experiments are extremely challenging and limited for extraterrestrial environment. Also, realistic simulation demonstrations in…
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…
University of Colorado Boulder(科罗拉多大学博尔德分校);Center for Astrophysics(天体物理中心);Space Astronomy(空间天文学)
Humans and robots will need to collaborate in order to create a sustainable human lunar presence by the end of the 2020s. This includes cases in which a human will be required to teleoperate an autonomous rover that has encountered an instrument assembly failure. To aid teleoperators in the troubleshooting process, we propose a virtual reality digital twin placed in a simulated environment. Here, the operator can virtually interact with a digital version of the rover and mechanical arm that uses the same controls and kinematic model. The user can also adopt the egocentric (a first person view …
The interest in returning to the Moon for research and exploration has increased as new tipping point technologies are providing the possibility to do so. One of these initiatives is the Artemis program by NASA, which plans to return humans by 2024 to the lunar surface and study water deposits on the surface. This program will also serve as a practice run to plan the logistics of sending humans to explore Mars. To return humans safely to the Moon, multiple technological advances and diverse knowledge about the nature of the lunar surface are needed. This paper will discuss the design and imple…
Advance Simulation Method for Wheel-Terrain Interactions of Space Rovers: A Case Study on the UAE Rashid Rover
Khalifa University Center for Autonomous and Robotic Systems(哈利法大学自主与机器人系统中心);Advanced Research and Innovation Center(先进研究与创新中心);Khalifa University(哈利法大学)
Breadboarding the European Moon Rover System: discussion and results of the analogue field test campaign
GMV Aerospace and Defence SAU(GMV航空防务SAU公司);GMV NSL Ltd(GMV NSL有限公司);AVS Added Value Solutions(AVV增值解决方案公司);OHB System AG(OHB系统股份公司);Hellenic Technology of Robotics(希腊机器人技术公司)
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…
A Photorealistic Dataset and Vision-Based Algorithm for Anomaly Detection During Proximity Operations in Lunar Orbit
Space and Terrestrial Autonomous Robotic Systems (STARS) Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)(多伦多大学航空航天研究所(UTIAS)空间与地面自主机器人系统实验室);Toronto Robotics and AI Laboratory (TRAIL) at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)(多伦多大学航空航天研究所(UTIAS)多伦多机器人与人工智能实验室);MDA Space Inc.(MDA航天公司)
Using physics-based simulation towards eliminating empiricism in extraterrestrial terramechanics applications
School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学船舶海洋与建筑工程学院);University of Wisconsin-Madison(威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校);Ames Research Center, NASA(美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心);NASA, Glenn Research Center(美国国家航空航天局格伦研究中心);ProtoInnovations, LLC(ProtoInnovations有限责任公司);Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院)
Extraterrestrial rovers with a general-purpose robotic arm have many potential applications in lunar and planetary exploration. Introducing autonomy into such systems is desirable for increasing the time that rovers can spend gathering scientific data and collecting samples. This work investigates the applicability of deep reinforcement learning for vision-based robotic grasping of objects on the Moon. A novel simulation environment with procedurally-generated datasets is created to train agents under challenging conditions in unstructured scenes with uneven terrain and harsh illumination. A m…