IST Lunch Bunch

Small, autonomous, aerial vehicles have a wide variety of potential applications on Earth and in solar system exploration. The autonomous navigation capabilities needed for such vehicles are also relevant to navigating around small airless bodies in space: comets, asteroids, and small moons. This talk will give an overview of potential Earth and space applications, summarize recent progress at JPL on vision-aided state estimation, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous safe landing for micro air vehicles on Earth, then relate these results to current work toward small autonomous rotorcraft for missions to Mars and Titan.