Mars Rover Autonomous Keyboard Typing

Part of the BRACU Mongol-Tori Mars Rover team's vision-guided autonomy work, this prototype lets the rover's onboard vision system find and read a physical keyboard so commands can be entered without a human aiming a camera by hand — a small piece of the same object-detection and autonomous-vision pipeline that improved the rover's on-board inference performance by up to 30% for the University Rover Challenge.

A YOLOv8 model handles real-time keyboard detection in the camera frame, and PaddleOCR reads the individual keys once the keyboard region is localized, so the system knows both where a key is and what it says. Detected key positions are angle-mapped to the rover arm's reference frame so a keypress can be executed as a physical motion rather than just a bounding box.