Event

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Vandi Verma, "NASA robotic pioneers on Mars"

Friday, April 20, 2018
2:00 p.m.
2216 JM Patterson
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar

Robotic pioneers on Mars and the simulators that drive them

Vandi Verma, PhD
Robotics Technologist
Mobility and Robotics Systems
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Abstract
Curiosity is the latest rover sent to Mars as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. This talk provides an overview of the challenges of operating a roving science laboratory on Mars, current approaches and results, and discusses the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.

Host

Mumu Xu

Biography
Vandi Verma is a Robotics Technologist in the Mobility and Robotics Systems section at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She graduated in 2005 with a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

She is a senior rover driver and has been operating rovers on Mars for the past 10 years. She designed and implemented the flight software simulation for Curiosity robotic operations, and flight software for autonomous science. Previously she led the MEXEC and PLEXIL teams that developed on-board autonomy and formally verifiable plan execution for robotic missions.
Her research work has been deployed on rovers in the Arctic, Antarctic and the Atacama. She is currently working on robotics flight software for Mars 2020 and leads the development of the flight software simulation for the rover.