Hazard avoidance is a key technology for landing large payloads safely on the surface of Mars. During hazard avoidance a lander uses onboard sensors to detect hazards in the landing zone, autonomously selects a safe landing site, and then maneuvers to the new site. Design of a system for hazard avoidance is facilitated by simulation where trades involving sensor and mission requirements can be ...

This article describes a concept of an autonomous landing system of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). This type of device is equipped with the functionality of FPV observation (First Person View) and radio broadcasting of video or image data. The problem is performance of a system of autonomous drone landing in an area with dimensions of 1m × 1m, based on CCD camera coupled with an image transmiss...

Landing an aircraft in a remote landing zone autonomously presents several challenges. Firstly, the exact location, orientation, and elevation of the landing zone is not always known; secondly, the accuracy of the aircrafts navigation solution is not always sufficient for this type of precision maneuver. This paper explores a method for estimating the relative position and attitude of the aircr...

Many sport and movement activities contain a jumping component which necessitates landing. Several injury surveys across a variety of jump sports have identified the lower extremities and specifically the knee joint as being a primary injury site. Factors which might contribute to the frequency and severity of such injuries include stresses to which the body is subjected during performance (for...

This paper introduces the forced landing problem for UAVs and presents the machine-vision based approach taken for this research. The forced landing problem, is a new field of research for UAVs and this paper will show the preliminary analysis to date. The results are based on video data collected from a series of flight trials in a Cessna 172. The aim of this research is to locate " safe " lan...

Autonomous landing is a challenging problem for aerial robots. An autonomous landing manoeuver depends largely on two capabilities: the decision of where to land and the generation of control signals to guide the vehicle to a safe landing. We focus on the rst capability here by presenting a strategy and an underlying fast algorithm as the computer vision basis to make a safe landing decision. T...

We present the design and implementation of a realtime, vision-based landing algorithm for an autonomous helicopter. The helicopter is required to navigate from an initial position to a final position in a partially known environment based on GPS and vision, locate a landing target (a helipad of a known shape) and land on it. We use vision for precise target detection and recognition. The helic...

We present the design and implementation of a real-time, vision-based landing algorithm for an autonomous helicopter. The landing algorithm is integrated with algorithms for visual acquisition of the target (a helipad), and navigation to the target, from an arbitrary initial position and orientation. We use vision for precise target detection and recognition, and a combination of vision and GPS...

Photoclinometry was used to analyze the small-scale roughness of areas that fall within the proposed Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 2003 landing ellipses. The landing ellipses presented in this study were those in Athabasca Valles, Elysium Planitia, Eos Chasma, Gusev Crater, Isidis Planitia, Melas Chasma, and Meridiani Planum. We were able to constrain surface slopes on length scales comparable t...

Cytotoxic activity of non-major histocompatibility complex-restricted (CD56+) (NMHC) killer cells and cell surface marker expression of peripheral blood mononuclear cells were determined before and after spaceflight. Ten astronauts (9 men, 1 woman) from two space shuttle missions (9- and 10-day duration) participated in the study. Blood samples were collected 10 days before launch, within 3 h a...