Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

Dario Tscholl

(Faculty advisor: Brian Gunter)

"Safe Perception-Integrated Planning and Control for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles on Earth and Beyond"

Thursday, October 15

4:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Montgomery Knight 317

Abstract: 

Aerial vehicles can map, inspect and reach places that are hard or impossible to access from the ground. These capabilities are attractive for planetary exploration where traditional rovers are slow and heavily constrained by their ground mobility. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter demonstrated the value of flight in planetary exploration, showing how aerial mobility can substantially extend the reach of a mission. However, realizing those capabilities on another planet requires a high degree of autonomy. The vehicle must be able to perceive its surroundings, plan its motion and react to hazards with little or no help from human operators. To do so, aerial vehicles typically rely on camera-based sensing because of mission constraints on size, weight and power. Even for a mission as successful as Ingenuity, its final flight shows how closely safety is tied to perception. The helicopter was flying over terrain with far less visual texture than it was designed for and its camera-based navigation lost track of its motion, so the flight ended in a hard landing. Safety for camera-guided aerial vehicles therefore depends on how faithfully the information in the images is carried into the decisions of the planner and the controller. This thesis addresses that question at three levels of the autonomy stack, including the control, planning and platform level. The central idea of this thesis, called perception-integrated safety, is to formulate safety conditions directly from camera-derived geometric and uncertainty representations, rather than converting them into additional maps whose simplifications (e.g., inflated obstacles or landmarks assumed to be perfectly known) can make a safety assessment either too conservative or too optimistic.

Committee:
Dr. Brian Gunter (advisor), School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Brian Gunter, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Yashwanth Nakka, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Lu Gan, School of Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Federico Rossi, NASA
Dr. Roland Brockers, NASA