Dr. Andres Castano is a Senior Member of Technical Staff of the Machine Vision Group at NASA/JPL. His work at JPL has focused on detection and recognition. He developed the dust devil and cloud detection algorithms of the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) - these are the first algorithms that have ever been used to automate science acquisition on a planetary rover (previous automation algorithms have addressed solely engineering processes, particularly mobility). He has also participated in various target detection projects for science acquisition and surveillance for both Nasa and military sponsors. Before joining JPL, he worked at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC/ISI) where he was the lead roboticist for the CONRO project on reconfigurable robots.

Ph.D. 98, M.S. 92, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

M.S. 90, B.S. 87, from the Universidad de los Andes

All degrees in Electrical Engineering.

• Automatic target detection and recognition
• Perception for autonomous navigation