Event Location: 1305 NSH
Bio: Alberto Elfes has an E.Eng. degree in Electronics Engineering (1975) and an M.Sc. in Computer Science (1980), both from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), Brazil, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1989) from Carnegie-Mellon University. He is the author of the Occupancy Grid and Inference Grid frameworks, probabilistic lattice-based approaches for autonomous robot perception, mapping, navigation and control.

From 1986 to 1989 Dr. Elfes was a research associate at the Robotics Institute and the Engineering Design Research Center, CMU. From 1989 to 1993 he was a research scientist at the Department of Computer Sciences, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. From 1993 to 1998 he worked for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as the Coordinator of Education and Research Programs for the DESI pilot project in strategic information technologies in Brazil. From 1994 to 2000 Dr. Elfes also served as director of the Automation Institute, Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, where he led the development of AURORA, the first autonomous robotic airship reported in the literature.

During the 2000 and 2001 academic years, Dr. Elfes was on sabbatical at the FAW research institute in Germany as recipient of the Mercator Professorship Award of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Since 2001, Dr. Elfes has been a Principal Researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He leads projects in autonomous aerial and ocean vehicles for planetary exploration and Earth science missions; supervisory and cooperative architectures for perception, planning and control of multi-robot teams; and decision-theoretic approaches for space mission planning and optimization. He has over 130 publications in international journals, conferences and books, and has lectured extensively in North America, Europe, Brazil and Japan.

Abstract: In addition to Earth, several other bodies in the Solar System have dense enough atmospheres to allow aerial exploration: Venus, Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and the gas giants. NASA’s Solar System Exploration Roadmap identifies aerial vehicles as a strategic new technology for planetary exploration, and future airborne missions at Titan, Mars and Venus are currently being studied.

Titan, in particular, has attracted enormous scientific interest in recent years. The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn has unveiled Titan as a highly complex world, with an atmospheric liquid cycle based on methane. Lakes, dune fields and sierras have been observed from orbit. However, a detailed exploration of Titan will require in situ platforms, as the cloud cover limits orbital surveys.

The atmosphere of Titan enables the use of buoyant robotic vehicles (aerobots) that could be either self-propelled (airships) or wind-driven (balloons). These vehicles can provide extensive, low-altitude geographical coverage over multi-month time scales with minimal consumption of scarce onboard electrical power. Airships have the advantage of being able to fly to specific science locations, while balloons are simpler in their design, but limited in their “go-to” capability.

In this talk we will present the scientific promise of Titan, the challenges involved in aerobot exploration of Titan, and the autonomy capabilities required for a year-long aerial mission. We will describe the aerobot autonomy architecture being developed at JPL, and discuss some of the key components. We will also show results from autonomous flight tests conducted in the Mojave Desert.