End Notes and Survey
Current and future challenges in space robotics and vision
Leo Hartman and Ioannis Rekleitis
Canadian Space Agency
leo.hartman@space.gc.ca, ioannis.rekleitis@space.gc.ca
6767 Airport Rd., St-Hubert QC J3Y 8Y9 Canada
www.space.gc.ca
Abstract
The Canadian Space Agency is involved in several robotics activities
including on orbit servicing and assembly and planetary exploration. With
Nasa's Vision for Exploration likely to dominate the global space sector for
the coming decades, the importance of and our dependence on robotics, and
therefore, vision and other wide area sensing technologies, for reliable and
lower cost missions will only increase. This presentation will provide a
short overview of CSA's current robotic challenges and, by way of
summarizing the workshop, the possible challenges and opportunities of the
future.
Biographies
Leo Hartman received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of
Rochester in 1990. His dissertation investigates the use of decision theory
for allocating computational resources in deductive planning. After a
post-doc at the University of Waterloo, he joined the Canadian Space Agency
in 1993 as a research scientist. His work there focuses on computing,
networking and automation for space missions.
Ioannis Rekleitis is currently a visiting fellow at the Canadian Space
Agency and adjunct Professor at the School of Computer Science, McGill
University. His work is focusing on developing software systems for
autonomous planetary exploration and On-Orbit servicing. He also works on
sensor networks and distributed robotics. During 2002-2003 he was a
post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon University with Prof. Howie Choset
working on multi-robot coverage and single robot exploration. He obtained
his Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from the School of Computer Science, McGill
University, in 2002 and 1995 respectively. His Ph.D. work was on
``Cooperative Localization and Multi-Robot Exploration'', Supervisors:
Gregory Dudek and Evangelos Milios. His M.Sc. thesis was titled ``Optical
Flow Estimation by Analysis of Motion Blur'', Supervisors: Godfried T.
Toussaint and David Jones. He has a B.Sc. degree from the Department of
Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Athens, Greece at 1991. His
interests are in robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, sensor
networks, multi-robot systems, and software architectures for complex
systems.