Larry Matthies, senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, presents the "Using Vision to Enable Autonomous Land, Sea and Air Vehicles" keynote at the May 2016 Embedded Vision Summit.
Say you’re an autonomous rover and you’ve just landed on Mars. Vexing questions now confront you: “Where am I and how am I moving?” “What obstacles are around me?” “Are the obstacles moving?” “What other objects are around me that matter to my mission?” As it turns out, Earth isn’t that different from Mars in this regard. If you’re an autonomous car or drone, you face similar challenges. You’ve got to find combinations of sensors that work across different illumination, weather, temperature, and vehicle dynamics; processors that fit the size, weight, and power constraints of the system; and algorithms that can answer the questions given the sensors and processors available. In this talk, Matthies gives an overview of autonomous vehicle computer vision applications, explores successful approaches, and illustrates concepts with application examples from applications on Earth and in planetary exploration.
