Sensing, perception, and the ability to locate itself in its surroundings are key elements of autonomous vehicles and a core element of our group’s research. We are interested in studying vehicles that operate independently from external support, and our work starts with autonomous onboard navigation.
Many space vehicles are tracked from the ground where a navigation solution is formed and used to compute maneuvers offline that are then commanded from the ground and executed by the spacecraft. Other vehicles rely on the ground or GPS for their navigation but are able to compute their translational maneuvers onboard.
While we are interested in all aspects of autonomous Guidance, Navigation, and Control, our emphasis is GPS-denied onboard navigation that is independent of ground support. In particular, vision-based navigation techniques are heavily researched, our research in this are includes:
- Optical Cameras. Image correlation, feature detection, optical flow.
- LIDARs. Both scanning and flash, point cloud processing and registration.
