MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0pre6 Date: Monday, 25-Nov-96 23:57:15 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 19674 Last-Modified: Thursday, 31-Oct-96 14:43:52 GMT Mobile Robotics / Shape Group, CIM, McGill

Robot Picture Information on the Mobile Robotics and Shape Recognition group at CIM

Here is a special link re. ROBODAEMON put in place for the McGill 175th anniversary Open House.

The mobile robotics and shape recognition group is an informal grouping of people and projects at the centre. The group has at least three mobile robots sporting a collection of sensors including sonar, video, BIRIS, and infra-red reflectance, depending on the current experiments in progress. The primary computing resources are SGI Indigos and INDYs, some SUN sparc's, and a few other computing devices integrated into the general CIM computing environment.
Last update: October 1996.

This group is involved in issues of form representation and discovery. This relates specifically to the

Key technical foci are the abstraction of shape models across scale, the relationship between signals and symbolic descriptions.

Some of the problems we are interested in include the following. How can a moving observer such as a robot recognize where it is? How can it build but a virtual reality model of its world for use by a human operator (this is important for tasks such as remote inspection)? How can a robot learn efficiently about where it is? How can a group of robots collaboate efficiently?

A typical prosaic objective create a robot than can learn your office over the weekend: It is delivered on Friday, you open the box, leave it on the floor, and go home. By Monday morning the robot would have explored the office and would be able to carry out delivery and search tasks (``Get my mail and find Mary and escort her to the conference room'').

Note: this page is informally maintained by Professor Gregory Dudek from the School of Computer Science and, as such, is not meant to be representative of research at the Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM) or McGill as a whole. It's rarely up-to-date. We are at McGill University in Montreal. This link provides information on visiting us.


Other Information

A small amount of additional information, some papers and some demo software from the mobile robotics group is available for FTP access.

Bibliography, by sub-topic

A bibliography on mobile robotics, together with entries on related research topics, can be searched on-line. A slightly dated list of selected references is available in postscript form.
You are invited to submit additional entries to be included.

Movie


A two minute demo movie is available in quicktime format (7.4 Meg binhex encoded) illustrative 4-frame animation or in MPEG format (3.1 Meg). The quicktime version is a compressed MacBinary file. The MPEG version has no audio track; a major disadvantage. Be warned that to keep the size down, the movie has been severly compressed and the quality isn't great (image size is 160x120 but it should be played a double size on most machines).

Newton books

  • Much is this information is also available in the form of a Newton Book for perusal using an Apple Newton device. Click here to obtain a "stuffit" archive of this book. (Note: some of the terms above may be tradmarked by their respective owners.)
  • A brief abstract of some of our work on position estimation in different contexts is also available for download as a Newton book.
  • More information sources are mentioned at the end of this page.


    Graduate students

    If you want to apply to be a grad student working in this group, you can get further information from the school of computer science. Note that CIM is not an "academic unit" and different faculty are officially associated with different departments.


    Some specific projects

    Cute Robots!


    Some other (outside) information sources

    There is an archive for several general CIM Technical Reports.

    Robotics Internet Page at U. Mass.

    Cambridge University Press.

    MIT Press.

    The IRIS/PRECARN page.


    Keywords

    mobile robot, mcgill, robots, autonomous, vision, perception, artificial intelligence, AI, robotics, telerobotics, computers, computer science, engineering, learning, environment mapping, map making, cartography, rendezvous, intelligent machines, cognition, cognitive science, learning, path planning, navigation, localization, positioning, modelling, modeling, shape, form, recognition, graduate students, students, teaching, research, canada, canadian, science, montreal, quebec, dudek, gregory, faculty, newton, movie, movies, sex (gotta attract web-bots somehow), multimedia.

    Legalities

    This document is Copyright (c) Gregory Dudek, 1996. You are granted permission for the non-commercial use, reproduction, distribution or display of this document in any format under the following restrictions. Appropriate credit is given as to its source and authorship. This permission is valid for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the time this document was obtained from McGill University. All other rights reserved by the author(s).