Occupancy grid mapping for rover navigation based on semantic segmentation

Obstacle mapping is a fundamental building block of the autonomous navigation pipeline of many robotic platforms such as planetary rovers. Nowadays, occupancy grid mapping is a widely used tool for obstacle perception. It foreseen the representation of the environment in evenly spaced cells, whose posterior probability of being occupied is updated based on range sensors measurement. In more classic approaches, the cells are updated to occupied at the point where the ray emitted by the range sensor encounters an obstacle, such as a wall. The main limitation of this kind of methods is that they are not able to identify planar obstacles, such as slippery, sandy, or rocky soils. In this work, we use the measurements of a stereo camera combined with a pixel labeling technique based on Convolution Neural Networks to identify the presence of rocky obstacles in planetary environment. Once identified, the obstacles are converted into a scan-like model. The estimation of the relative pose between successive frames is carried out using ORB-SLAM algorithm. The final step consists of updating the occupancy grid map using the Bayes’ update Rule. To evaluate the metrological performances of the proposed method images from the Martian analogous dataset, the ESA Katwijk Beach Planetary Rover Dataset have been used. The evaluation has been performed by comparing the generated occupancy map with a manually segmented ortomosaic map, obtained by drones’ survey of the area used as reference.

Notes from the Editors, December 2021

buy this issue With the rapidly worsening capitalist demolition of the planetary environment and the expansion of ecosocialist movements in response, leading establishment think tanks, like the corporate-supported Breakthrough Institute, dedicated to promoting the ideology of "green capitalism" at any cost, have found themselves in a difficult place.

COVID-19 Lessons for Climate Change and Sustainable Health

The drivers underpinning the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and climate change attest to the fact that we are now living in the Anthropocene Epoch, with human activities significantly impacting and altering the global ecosystem. Here, we explore the historical context of zoonoses, the effect of anthropogenic climate change and interrelated drivers on the emergence of, and response to emerging infectious diseases. We call attention to an urgent need for inculcating a One Health research agenda that acknowledges the primary interconnection between animals, humans, pathogens, and their collective milieus to foster long term resilience across all systems within our shared planetary environment.

Evolution of Earth-like extended exospheres orbiting solar-like stars

Recent observations of the Earth’s exosphere revealed the presence of an extended hydrogenic component that could reach distances beyond 40 planetary radii. Detection of similar extended exospheres around Earth-like exoplanets could reveal crucial facts in terms of habitability. The presence of these rarified hydrogen envelopes is extremely dependent of the planetary environment, dominated by the ionizing radiation and plasma winds coming from the host star. Radiation and fast wind particles ionize the uppermost layers of planetary atmospheres, especially for planets orbiting active, young stars. The survival of the produced ions in the exosphere of such these planets is subject to the action of the magnetized stellar winds, particularly for unmagnetized bodies. In order to address these star-planet interactions, we have carried out numerical 2.5D ideal MHD simulations using the PLUTO code to study the dynamical evolution of tenuous, hydrogen-rich, Earth-like extended exospheres for an unmagnetized planet, at different stellar evolutionary stages: from a very young, solar-like star of 0.1 Gyr to a 5.0 Gyr star. For each star-planet configuration, we show that the morphology of extended Earth-like hydrogen exospheres is strongly dependent of the incident stellar winds and the produced ions present in these gaseous envelopes, showing that the ionized component of Earth-like exospheres is quickly swept by the stellar winds of young stars, leading to large bow shock formation for later stellar ages.

Looking beyond the horizon. A normative-institutional approach to sustainability science; getting onto ‘the balcony’

This contribution is based upon an invited keynote to the CSS2020 Conference on Sustainability Science 2020 (Sustainability Science Post COVID-19; Social Distancing Life, Approaching Natural Life, October 8, 2020). Living in the ‘Anthropocene’ confronts us with major challenges regarding a sustainable and healthy planetary environment. Climate change and biodiversity degradation, but also the COVID-19 pandemic are testimony to this, and together they give cause to consider human responses to them. These responses come with several ‘tragic conditions’: on managing commons, on looking beyond our horizon, and on handling cognitive ambiguity. How can we institutionally safeguard against these conditions and have a better chance at avoiding disasters and recovering from them? This contribution points at some normative/legal arrangements establishing such safeguards, such as on a proper knowledge infrastructure, on guiding rights & principles, and on promoting resilience by taking a more system view. It is hoped that these examples will inspire thinking about how ‘to climb onto the balcony’, look beyond the horizon and act responsibly.

Crise : Quelques réflexions systémiques sur l'anthropocene

Prior to globalization, crises were due to local or regional environmental abuses, leadership conflicts, local or regional climatic disasters, major epidemics or pandemics. The humanity of the beginning of the 21st century is facing for the first time a situation of global change on a planetary scale. The origin of this change is endogenous to the human species. Scientific and technological evolution has endowed humanity with powerful means of action that have transformed it into an important actor in the planetary ecology. This transformation is a consequence of fundamental factors that have reinforced each other. The use of fossil fuels returns to the environment gigantic amounts of solar energy fossilized in vegetable form during the billions of years of the primary, secondary and tertiary geological ages. The inevitable consequence is and will be more and more, global climate warming. This profound change could it surely causes serious adjustment disorders in all human societies. It is in this sense that the word "crisis" acquires its full and sinister meaning. A financial crisis is nothing more than the repetition of a psychosociological episode also recurrent in the evolution of the economy. A remarkable consequence is that man (biological, psychosocial) has become a "piece" of a huge machine, on a planetary scale, and his activities are increasingly conditioned by this machine created by himself. The concept of competitive advantage generally dominates economic thinking. This way of thinking reflects the historical situation of humanity. Until today, the human species could progress without limits towards greater use of its planetary environment. The waste did not have a negative ecological significance. The most sensible and appropriate objective, certainly, is not to lead all of humanity to share the waste that, by hyper-consumption, characterizes, for the moment, the societies considered as developed. A rational objective would be to guarantee to all humanity a level of life as satisfactory as possible, based on truly renewable planetary resources, assuming the need to keep the planet habitable.

Technology Bill of Rights Needed to Protect Human and Environmental Health and the U. S. Constitutional Republic

For the protection of humanity and the planetary environment in general, and American citizens in particular, what is needed, we posit, is a set of new Constitutional Amendments that collectively form a second Bill of Rights, a Technology Bill of Rights, to protect our freedoms, health, air, water, agriculture, and the planetary environment from deliberate perversion and alteration. We describe the rationale for said Technology Bill of Rights that would: (1) Prohibit the application of any technique or method for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space; (2) Prohibit the application of any technique, including software-based process or platform or method for violating individuals free speech, censoring, altering, editing, deleting, excluding, blacklisting, or engaging in any activities that potentially bias votes or deceive the public on matters of health and/or environmental harm; and, (3) Prohibit activities of such scale and nature that would intentionally or unintentionally alter the complex but delicate balance in nature by and between myriad biota and their environments that makes our planet habitable for life. Whereas the meaning of (1) and (2) above is clear, (3) necessitates further clarification that may be inferred from the following non-exclusive examples of prohibited activities: ● Use of metallic and/or nano-particulate additions to aircraft fuel; ● Excessive launching of satellites, numbering in the tens of thousands, whose rocket exhaust might damage the ozone layer; ● Excessive exposure of humans and other biota to electromagnetic radiation; ● Use of electromagnetic radiation to heat the ionosphere; ● Pollution of air, land, water, agriculture, and aquaculture by particulates, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, radioactive nuclides, and bio-toxins; and, ● Strict oversight of biotechnology/bioengineering, including prohibition of gain-of-function experiments with potential pandemic pathogens.

How surfaces shape the climate of habitable exoplanets

ABSTRACT Large ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to observe Earth-like planets in the near future. We explore how different planetary surfaces can strongly influence the climate, atmospheric composition, and remotely detectable spectra of terrestrial rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone depending on the host star’s incident irradiation spectrum for a range of Sun-like host stars from F0V to K7V. We update a well-tested 1D climate-photochemistry model to explore the changes of a planetary environment for different surfaces for different host stars. Our results show that using a wavelength-dependent surface albedo is critical for modelling potentially habitable rocky exoplanets.