Mars Mission Emulation

The primary objective of this project is to build a simple yet comprehensive framework that emulates one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s missions on Mars. The addressed mission primarily uses the helicopter Ingenuity and the rover Perseverance to explore Mars. Similarly, our implementation of the developed framework uses a drone equipped with a single-board computer as the aerial vehicle and a wheeled mobile robot mainly utilizing a bare-metal microcontroller and multiple sensors as a ground vehicle. In this implementation, the aerial vehicle is the Hawk's Work F450 drone frame with the Raspberry Pi 4B as the single-board computer. For the robot side, the TI RSLK robot is used as the wheeled mobile robot. The job of the aerial vehicle is to scan the environment and detect certain objects. The job of the ground vehicle is to receive commands from the aerial vehicle and execute tasks. The communication between the two platforms is wireless. An important objective of this project is to expose students and new graduates to an environment similar to a realistic high-end operation. This includes working with a complete system featuring concepts like aerial systems, machine learning, computer vision, sensor integration, robotics, wireless communication, and Linux-based operating systems.

The our framework implementation is summarized in this block diagram:

A high-level system workflow is shown below:

A full report explaining the project details can be found from the following link:
https://github.com/csun-opencv/Mars-Mission-Emulation/blob/main/docs/Fall23_Mars_Mission_Emulation_Framework_ECE_493_Senior_Paper.pdf

A presentation highlighting the main parts of the project:
https://github.com/csun-opencv/Mars-Mission-Emulation/blob/main/media/Mars_Mission_Emulation_Presentation_Demo.pptx

A proof of concept application is presented in the following video featuring the following:
Detect Robot and Green Cone >> Command the robot to Visit and Dock

Detect Robot and Red Cone >> Command the robot to Showcase

Detect Robot and Yellow Cone >> Command the robot to Avoid Danger