Abstract: The MoonRanger Lunar rover will demonstrate continuous, on-board, long-range autonomous navigation at the Moon's South Pole. In this thesis, I describe how MoonRanger estimates its position and orientation using input from several sensors: Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), Sun Sensor, wheel encoders, and cameras. I thoroughly review the state estimation approaches for prior space rovers [...]

Abstract: The evaluation of generalist robot policies, particularly Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, is limited by the cost and scalability of real-world testing. This thesis introduces RobotArena ∞, a scalable benchmarking framework for large-scale simulation-based evaluation. Central to RobotArena ∞ is a fully automated reality-to-simulation (Real2Sim) pipeline that converts monocular video demonstrations from datasets such as Bridge, [...]

Abstract: Modern perception increasingly relies on wide field-of-view cameras, yet standard convolutional networks still operate on planar pixel grids designed for pinhole imagery. By Gauss's Theorema Egregium, no projection from the sphere to the plane preserves curvature, so every planar map of a spherical signal introduces spatially-varying distortion. Models trained on one lens therefore overfit [...]

Abstract: Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution to the growing challenges of data acquisition in object detection. Modern detectors rely heavily on large-scale annotated datasets, yet collecting real-world data with high-quality labels is often costly, labor-intensive, and impractical in diverse or rare scenarios. By enabling controllable generation with automatic annotations, synthetic data provides [...]