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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Navigational Feasibility Of Flyby / Impact Missions To Interstellar Objects, Declan Moore Mages Dec 2019

Navigational Feasibility Of Flyby / Impact Missions To Interstellar Objects, Declan Moore Mages

Master's Theses

In October 2017, the first interstellar object, designated 1I/2017 U1 and more commonly referred to as Oumuamua, was detected passing through our solar system by the Pan-STARRS telescope, followed recently by the detection of 2I/Borisov in August 2019. These detections came much sooner than thought possible, and have redefined our understanding of the population of interstellar objects. With the construction of the next generation of powerful observatories, future detections are estimated to occur as frequently as two per year, and while there is significant scientific understanding to be gained from observing these objects remotely, a spacecraft sent to intercept one …


Robot Navigation In Cluttered Environments With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ryan Weideman Jun 2019

Robot Navigation In Cluttered Environments With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ryan Weideman

Master's Theses

The application of robotics in cluttered and dynamic environments provides a wealth of challenges. This thesis proposes a deep reinforcement learning based system that determines collision free navigation robot velocities directly from a sequence of depth images and a desired direction of travel. The system is designed such that a real robot could be placed in an unmapped, cluttered environment and be able to navigate in a desired direction with no prior knowledge. Deep Q-learning, coupled with the innovations of double Q-learning and dueling Q-networks, is applied. Two modifications of this architecture are presented to incorporate direction heading information that …