Autonomous Detection of Dust Devils and Clouds on Mars

Acquisition of science in space applications is shifting from teleoperated gathering to an automated on-board analysis with improvements in the use of on-board memory, CPU, bandwidth and data quality. In this paper, we describe algorithms to autonomously detect dust devils and clouds from a rover and summarize the results. These algorithms meet high hitto-miss ratios and satisfy strict requirements of CPU, memory usage and bandwidth. The detectors have been scheduled for upload to the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) in 2006. These are the first autonomous science processes in the rovers.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICIP
• Authors: Alex Fukunaga, Andres Castano, Jeffrey J. Biesiadecki, Lynn Neakrase, Mark Lemmon, Patrick Whelley, Rebecca Castaño, Ronald Greeley, Steve A. Chien
• Keywords: Autonomous Science Processes, ICIP 2006, Image Processing, Mars Exploration Rovers, On-board Analysis, On-board Memory