VASC Seminar Announcement
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Date: Monday, 2/28/00
Time: 3:45:4:40
Place: outside of NSH 4113

Speaker:  Grgoire Terrien
Title: Sensor Data Fusion Interface for Remote Machine Teleoperation

Teleoperating a remote system is known to be difficult. In order to
make this task easier, technologies such as sensor fusion can be used
to combine complementary information from several sensors in a single
observation such that it represents the scene in a more intuitive
manner.  In this work, we started from an existing sensor fusion
platform with sonars and a stereo camera, and added a laser range
finder to it. We mounted the sensors on a Pioneer mobile robot, and we
built an efficient interface to drive the remote system accurately.

Adding a laser to the set of sensors improves the quality of the
fused data. Compared with other sensors, the laser has a better
angular resolution, wider field of view, and it is not effected by the
surface types. These advantages make the system very accurate in
detecting obstacles. We mounted the sensors on a Pioneer mobile robot
to close the loop of control (environment - sensors
- computer - human - computer - robot - environment). With this
configuration, the user is able to drive the robot from his/her monitor,
making decisions based on the fused data from the sensors.

The overall system has three data processing elements: the human, the host
and the robot computer. Since the human is the most capable, we use his
resources to analyze high-level data. The host computer has to display the
data received from the robot in a user-friendly way. Because operating a
remote machine is not easy, we also implemented low-level control on the
robot. These include obstacle avoidance and automatic drive capabilities.
Other tools such as a robot size estimation tool, a distance measurement
tool and a correspondence finder are provided for more straightforward data
analyzing.

There will be a live demo after the talk.