Rovers operating on Mars have been delayed, diverted, and trapped by loose granular materials. Vision-based mobility prediction approaches often fail because hazardous sand is difficult to distinguish from safe sand based on surface appearance alone. Unlike surface appearance, the thermal inertia of terrain is directly correlated to the same geophysical properties that control slip. This paper ...

The log-polar space variant representation, motivated by biological vision, has been widely studied in the literature. Its data reduction and invariance properties made it useful in many vision applications. However, due to its nature, it fails in preserving features in the periphery. In the current work, as an attempt to overcome this problem, we propose a novel space-variant representation. I...

An extensive survey of logic and memory component manufacturers conducted by the NASA Electronic Research Center and the industry has resulted in estimates of the state-of-the-art of components available to designers of on-board guidance and control computers for long-term deep-space missions for the 1970-72 period. The vehicle for the survey were the mission requirements for the synchronous sa...

The report issued by the Inquiry Board in charge of inspecting the Ariane 5 flight 50.1 failure concludes that causes of the failure are rooted into poor S/W Engineering practice. From the failure scenario described in the Inquiry Board report, it is possible to infer what, in our view, are the real causes of the 501 failure. We develop arguments to demonstrate that the real causes of the 501 f...

The software running on electronic devices is regularly updated, these days. A vehicle consists of many such devices, but is operated in a completely different manner than consumer devices. Update operations are safety critical in the automotive domain. Thus, they demand for a very well secured process. We propose an on-board security architecture which facilitates such update processes by comb...

Electric agglomeration is the process in which particles are charged in electric fields and coagulate, which is enhanced by electric force or turbulence. The collection efficiency of submicron particles is improved, which can be a solution to submicron particle abatement in traditional electrostatic precipitators (ESPs), by using a pre-charger to increase median particle diameter and realizing ...