You're invited to attend

Autonomous ZUPTs and Cooperative ZUPTs
for Improved Wheeled Rover Localization

by

Jason Gross

Associate Professor and Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering | West Virginia University

Thursday, February 16
3 - 4 PM
Student Success Center Press Room A

About the Seminar: 
Future planetary rovers will require improved onboard autonomy. A key component of meeting this need is more reliable self-localization. Autonomous self-localization can be a challenge, especially in the absence of external aiding. This seminar will discuss some research conducted in the Navigation Lab at West Virginia University to address some of these challenges for applications including wheeled planetary exploration rovers and cooperative robots operating in GPS degraded environments. In particular, the seminar will review a method that uses zero-velocity updates coupled with a simple machine learning approach to learn and predict important environmental factors that impact the performance of wheel-inertial odometry based localization. Onboard predictions are shown to be effective at autonomously triggering motion constraints to significantly reduce the rate localization drift. This benefit is then extended to decentralized multi-agent systems and experimentally demonstrated.  Finally, the seminar will overview a few other related projects including WVU’s entry to the NASA Space Robotics Challenge and a robot/drone team developed for limestone mine inspections.

About the Speaker: 
Jason Gross is an associate professor and serves as the department Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from WVU in 2011, received his undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering from WVU in 2007. From 2011 to December 2013, he worked as Research Technologist in the Near Earth Tracking Applications Group at Caltech's NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on robotic systems and unmanned aerial system with an emphasis on perception and localization. He directs the WVU Navigation Lab, is a coordinator of WVU’s growing robotics program, and was the lead for WVU’s Space Robotics Challenge 2 team. He is past recipient of an NGA New Investigator Program grant, AFOSR Faculty Fellowship, WVU Big XII Faculty Fellowship, and WVU Statler College Outstanding Teaching and Excellence in Research awards. He is an associate editor for navigation systems in IEEE’s transactions on aerospace electronic systems and IEEE’s aerospace electronic systems magazine. He is a senior member of the AIAA, senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the Institute of Navigation.