ISER’04 Keynote Speech
Dr. Larry Matthies Supervisor, Machine Vision Group Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA, USA 91109
Title: The Mars Exploration Rover Mission
Digest · Overview of the mission, including highlights of rover, lander, mission operations, and science objectives and results. · Rovers use onboard stereo vision, visual odometry, and local obstacle avoidance for autonomous navigation. · Landers used descent imagery to estimate horizontal velocity during terminal descent by tracking features on the surface. · Mission has determined that shallow water existed for a considerable time at Opportunity landing site.
About the Speaker Larry Matthies received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989 and has been at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since then. He has led the Machine Vision Group there since it was formed in 1997. His research interests are in perception for autonomous navigation of unmanned ground and air vehicles, including 3-D perception, motion estimation, and terrain classification for day/night, all-terrain, all-weather operation. He participated in development of the structured light range-finding system that was used in the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission and he developed the stereo vision and visual odometry algorithms that are in use on Spirit and Opportunity in the 2004 Mars Exploration Rover mission. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California.