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Many planetary rover missions require information about vehicle position. For example, a mission to visit the Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon requires knowledge of absolute position, such as latitude/longitude, and a sense of local position, such as knowing about a crater four vehicle lengths ahead. On Earth, the Global Positioning System (GPS) supplies position data; on the Moon and beyond, rovers must determine their location by themselves.
This talk will present a family of position estimation techniques suitable for rovers that cannot depend on GPS. It will briefly discuss local positioning techniques based on odometry, inclinometry, and inertial sensing. It will concentrate on two topics in global positioning using computer vision: celestial navigation and visual landmark navigation.
Dr. Eric Krotkov is a Senior Research Scientist at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. His research area is machine perception. He earned his Ph.D. degree in 1987 from the University of Pennsylvania, for pioneering work in the area of active computer vision. Before joining Carnegie Mellon in 1988, he served as a post-doctoral fellow at the CNRS in Toulouse, France, developing computer vision techniques for mobile robots. Dr. Krotkov has authored one book and 15 journal articles in the areas of his current efforts: (1) Perception for autonomous planetary rovers, and (2) Perception of material properties by robotic probing.