Event Location: GHC 2109
Bio: Chris Cunningham is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute advised
by Red Whitaker. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering
from the University of Virginia in 2012. His current research focuses
on terrain classification and slip prediction for planetary robots.

Abstract: Loose, granular soil can trap planetary rovers causing costly delays
and even mission-ending failures. Soft Martian soil trapped
Opportunity for more than a month and ended Spirit’s mission on Mars.
This research seeks to predict loose, hazardous terrain before rover
entrapment using a combination of visual and thermal sensing.
Non-contact traversability prediction will improve both the safety and
speed of planetary rovers. This talk presents a method to predict
terrain traversability by estimating the thermal diffusivity of
terrain using a moving, continuous-wave laser. This approach enable
differentiation between different densities of the same material,
which can have a significant effect on traversability. Thermal
diffusivity is estimated by fitting the temperature response of
terrain to an analytical model. Experimental soil strength
measurements are used to validate that this measurement is correlated
traversability. Finally, thermal sensing is used in combination with
visual features to show an improvement in terrain classification over
strictly visual techniques.