Improving slip prediction on Mars using thermal inertia measurements

Where Should I Walk? Predicting Terrain Properties From Images Via Self-Supervised Learning

“…This is not sufficient for ground robots, which by definition interact with the ground and need to exert forces onto the environment to move forward. For semanticaware navigation, additional and richer sensor streams like grayscale [4], RGB [8], [5], [9], [10], [11], NIR [12], [5] and thermal cameras [13] as well as RADAR [14] have been used.…”

“…The approach based on thermal inertia [13] requires observation of terrain over longer periods and is difficult to apply in use-cases other than space exploration, while modern RADARs are typically bulky and heavy and exceed the payload capacity of our target platform. Most camera-based approaches either classify different terrain types and then attach a value to every class [4], [5], [9], [12] or directly predict a manually defined traversability value [8], [10], [11].…”

Haptic Inspection of Planetary Soils With Legged Robots

“…For example, NASA's Spirit rover got immobilized on Mars after breaking through a solid-looking, crusty surface layer (duricrust) into the soft sand hidden underneath [3]. Notably, a recent study using thermal data has found a correlation between visual thermal data and slip behavior of the Curiosity rover, yet the robustness of the approach remains to be evaluated [4]. Manuscript Fig.…”

Thermal inertia as an integrative parameter for building performance

“…The relevance of the thermal inertia as material property can be observed beyond the building environment in other fields such as the renewable energy industry where the thermal inertia is used to highlight advantages with respect to more traditional power plants [15]. Further, in geophysical sciences, the thermal inertia is considered as a parameter of primary importance in the Earth and extra-terrestrial remote sensing because it controls diurnal and seasonal surface temperature variations in Earth [16] and Titan [17], and can be effectively used to correlate specific geophysical properties evaluated to improve the efficiency of vehicles operating in other planet such Mars [18]. The thermal inertia is therefore a parameter that is shared by different and varied scientific fields and as such provides an opportunity to connect their theoretical principles.…”