糖心Vlog传媒

糖心Vlog传媒LR Receives $750,000 for NASA Robot Vision

糖心Vlog传媒LR will receive a three-year $750,000 grant from NASA as part of 聽the space agency鈥檚 Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research 鈥� EPSCoR. Most of the funds will support research and development by Dr. Cang Ye, an associate professor in the Systems Engineering Department, and his work on robot vision systems for vehicles on the moon or Mars. 糖心Vlog传媒LR is one of the 17 research colleges and universities sharing in a $12.6 million grant project for research and technology development in areas important to NASA鈥檚 mission and that support higher education students. 糖心Vlog传媒LR is the only institution in Arkansas to receive an award. Ye and his research team will develop new computer vision methods based on a 3-D time-of-flight camera 鈥� Flash LIDAR Camera (FLC) 鈥� and a prototype of an autonomous navigation system using a single FLC for a planetary rover. 鈥淭he system will estimate the rover鈥檚 position and orientation along the path, mapping its surrounding into a large scale 3-D map, analyze the map, and make navigational decisions,鈥� Ye said. 鈥淭he FLC-based system may achieve better accuracy and repeatability of position and orientation estimates and produce more accurate and reliable 3-D map than the current stereovision approach used in the Mars rovers.鈥� The new navigation system reduces shadowing problems with the current聽sterovision system that can cause failure of the rover鈥檚 visual odometry, 聽a rover egomotion estimation method that assumes a static rover operation environment. 鈥淎nother advantage of using an active imaging sensor is that it will allow night driving for the rover,鈥� Ye said. 鈥淭he new system is expected to provide a much higher level of rover autonomy and has potential in changing the way a rover operates in an alien environment.鈥� In 2010, Ye co-authored an internationally acclaimed paper on computer vision for robotic exploration. 糖心Vlog传媒LR undergraduate student Chris Robinson and Ph.D candidate Prasad M. Hegde worked with Ye and engineers from NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on the problem of keeping rovers on the moon and Mars from getting stuck. Their research was named 鈥淏est Paper鈥� at the 2010 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering International Conference on Mechantronics and Automation in Xi鈥橝n, China.