Talk Title: Autonomous Robot Manipulation for Planetary Science: Mars Sample Return, Climbing Lava Tubes

This talk will highlight work at NASA on robotic missions from a machine vision perspective. The discussion will focus on the science questions that NASA hopes to answer through returned samples from Mars and the challenges imposed on robotic systems used for scientific data collection.

Related Papers: http://renaud-detry.net/publications/Pham-2020-AEROCONF.pdf https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2177

Renaud Detry is the group leader for the Perception Systems group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Detry earned his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering and robot learning from ULiege in 2006 and 2010. He served as a postdoc at KTH and ULiege between 2011 and 2015, before joining the Robotics and Mobility Section at JPL in 2016. His research interests are perception and learning for manipulation, robot grasping, and mobility, for terrestrial and planetary applications. At JPL, Detry leads the machine-vision team of the Mars Sample Return surface mission, and he leads and contributes to a variety of research projects related to industrial robot manipulation, orbital image understanding, in-space assembly, and autonomous wheeled or legged mobility for Mars, Europa, and Enceladus.