Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Galvez-Serna, Julian
• Ly, Phuong Nam
• Furlan, Federico
• Zepeda, Vanessa
• Vanegas, Fernando
• Flannery, David Timothy
• Gonzalez, Felipe

Titel

Towards a Biosignatures Image Detection System for Planetary Exploration with UAVs

Ist Teil von

• 2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2023, p.1-14

Ort / Verlag

IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library Online

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The search for life beyond Earth can benefit from orbiters and spacecraft with compact instruments able to identify potential biological signatures. One of the main challenges is the balance between a lower resolution and a wide field of view to discard uninteresting places while a high resolution - narrow field of view to collect data in higher detail. The recent flights of the Mars helicopter "Ingenuity" have shown UAVs are a viable platform to explore the surface of celestial objects in a wide and narrow approach using diverse remote sensing instruments. With data collected from real biosignatures in Western Australia, this work proposes an online UAV-based Artificial Intelligence detector using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based on ResNet18 and YOLO models able to detect multiple potential biological signatures in near real-time. The system and pipeline presented allow the inclusion of new observations refined by scientists to increase the scientific exploration outcomes for remote-based operations.