Starry Night

We're back from the Koffler Scientific Reserve at Joker's Hill having spent the entire night gathering a lidar-plus-star tracker dataset.  We were worried towards the start of the night as some clouds drifted past but the stars were out after that and cooperating nicely.  The next step is to process the dataset with our visual odometry algorithm to demonstrate full dark navigation.

Working hard, or hardly working?

We are at the Koffler Scientific Reserve at Joker's Hill (part of the University of Toronto), which is 25 km North of UTIAS near Newmarket.  Tonight we'll be gathering our first full-dark-navigation dataset (star tracker plus scanning lidar for in-the-dark visual odometry) and this venue is far enough out of the city that we can see the stars at night.  Of course, the pond, dock, gazebo, and beautiful surroundings don't hurt either.  It's going to be a long night but should be worth it.

We've been blogged!

Here's an IEEE Spectrum article about our recent experiment at the CSA's Mars Emulation Terrain.  They didn't quite get it all right...but you know what they say about publicity.