Speakers

Zachary Manchester

Bio:

Zac Manchester is an Associate Professor in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon where he leads the Robotic Exploration Lab. His research leverages insights from physics, control theory, and optimization to enable robotic systems that can achieve the same level of agility, robustness, and efficiency as humans and animals. His lab develops algorithms for controlling a wide range of autonomous systems from cars merging onto highways to spacecraft landing on Mars. Zac Previously worked at NASA Ames Research Center and received a NASA Early Career Faculty Award in 2018, a Google Faculty Award in 2020, and an NSF CAREER Award in 2025. He has also served as Principal Investigator of four NASA small-satellite missions.

Keynote Abstract: 

Over the past decade, flying a spacecraft has gone from something only government agencies and large corporations could afford to something universities and small startups can accomplish on a shoestring budget. While the growth of the commercial launch industry is partly responsible for this transformation, an even bigger factor has been advances in electronics and computation that have enabled smaller, cheaper, and more autonomous spacecraft. I will discuss my work to advance low-cost, autonomous spacecraft that can accomplish exciting new missions like global wildlife tracking, building a “Martian GPS,” and searching for life in the geysers of Enceladus. These technologies also carry the promise of a future in which access to spaceflight is democratized and widespread. I will highlight a number of recent missions, including KickSat-2, which deployed the four-gram Sprite – the world’s smallest spacecraft; V-R3x, which demonstrated on-orbit mesh networking; PY4, which demonstrated attitude-control and formation-flying capabilities without relying on expensive conventional sensors or actuators; and the upcoming Argus mission, which will demonstrate autonomous vision-based navigation in low-Earth orbit.

Keenan Albee

Bio:

Keenan Albee is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California and former Robotics Technologist in the Maritime and Multi-Agent Autonomy group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He received a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics (Autonomous Systems) from MIT in 2022 under a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. His research focuses on model-aware autonomy for space and extreme environment robotics, leveraging real-time tools to make autonomous robotic operations safer and more efficient. His work includes the first autonomous on-orbit rendezvous with an uncharacterized tumbling target---demonstrated on the Astrobee robots aboard the ISS---and multiple planning and multi-agent decision-making algorithms aboard the fully autonomous CADRE lunar rovers launching to the Moon. His research interests span extreme environment robotics, safe motion planning and control under uncertainty, and novel extreme environment systems development with a “theory to practice” philosophy of real-world field hardware validation.

Keynote Title:
Autonomy On-Orbit and Beyond: Expanding Mission Capabilities in Space Robotics

Abstract: 

Robotic autonomy is enabling increasingly ambitious mission concepts, but unknowns in the field can limit our willingness to let these systems operate truly independently. This talk explores some of the enduring algorithmic and safety challenges of working with increasing complexity in space robotics autonomy; in particular, the problem of motion planning and control under uncertainty will be explored in the context of providing robot motion that is safe, real-time, and tailored to the needs of real space robotic systems. This work is framed in the context of novel planning and control techniques in microgravity close proximity operations and planetary surface robotics, demonstrating, respectively, 1) planning, control, and state estimation for autonomous on-orbit rendezvous with an uncharacterized tumbling target; and 2) highly-constrained model predictive control for roving in unknown environments. Flight demonstrations of these techniques will be discussed for the Astrobee free-flyers aboard the ISS, and the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorer (CADRE) rovers launching to the Moon.