Mars helicopters, moon rovers, ocean world-crawlers…

Robotics Challenges for Planetary Exploration at NASA JPL: The exploration of the Solar System presents very unique challenges to roboticists. In this talk, Jeff Delaune from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will offer a perspective on what it means to develop the technology that enable these missions. He will also introduce some of the exciting next mission concepts that JPL is working on (Mars, Moon, Titan, Venus, and Enceladus)and how you can contribute to them. 

When: Thursday December 5, 2024  at 4.15 pm   

Where: University of Zurich, Irchel Campus, lecture hall Y15-G40

Host: Davide Scaramuzza, Professor of Robotics and Perception at UZH and part of the the UZH Space Hub Ecosystem

Davide Scaramuzza has been working with NASA JPL on the 2030 Mars Science Helicopter (MSH). This mission plans to deploy advanced unmanned helicopters on Mars, targeting challenging landing sites such as Valles Marineris, the Solar System's largest canyon, with height differences of up to 8,000 meters. Unlike the earlier Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which assumed planar terrain, the new helicopters will require a novel approach to handle the complex and uneven landscapes of these landing sites.

The collaboration revolves around

1. Mid Air Helicopter Delivery using a jet pack and
2. navigating the helicopter in lava tubes under the surface of Mars, which may contain ice

Find more in these publications: 

Ivan Alberico, Jeff Delaune, Giovanni Cioffi, Davide Scaramuzza, Structure-Invariant Range-Visual-Inertial Odometry, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.PDFVideo

F. Mahlknecht, D. Gehrig, J. Nash, F. M. Rockenbauer, B. Morrell, J. Delaune and D. Scaramuzza, Exploring Event Camera-based Odometry for Planetary Robots, Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), 2022PDFCode & DatasetsVideo

Speaker: Jeff Delaune is a robotics technologist in the Aerial Mobility Group at the  NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. His interests include autonomous exploration robots and vision-based navigation. Jeff has been part of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, Mars Sample Return Helicopters and CADRE lunar rover NASA missions. He received his Ph.D. in Robotics from Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE, France) in 2013, after a M.S. in Astronautics and Space Engineering from Cranfield University (United Kingdom), and a B.S./M.S. in Engineering from École Centrale de Nantes (France).