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Bruce Randall Donald
Bruce Randall Donald
Associate Professor
brd@cs.cornell.edu
Ph.D. MIT, 1987
Weather in Palo Alto.
My Official Departmental Home Page.
Cornell Robotics and Vision Laboratory
Dan Huttenlocher and I founded the
Cornell Robotics and Vision Laboratory in 1991.
Research
My interests include
robotics,
microelectromechanical systems,
geometric algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
Robotics is the science that seeks
to forge an intelligent, computational connection between perception
and action.
Working with graduate student Jim Jennings, research associate Daniela
Rus, graduate student
Russell Brown, and lab alumnus Jonathan Rees
(now at MIT), we developed a team of autonomous
mobile robots that can perform sophisticated distributed manipulation tasks
(such as moving furniture). The robots run
robust SPMD protocols that are completely asynchronous and require no
communication. With grad student Karl
Böhringer and EE Professor Noel MacDonald, we are building a
massively parallel array of microactuators in the
Cornell National Nanofabrication Laboratory. The array
is a SCREAM chip containing over 11,000 actuators in 1 square
centemeter, and can orient small parts without sensory
feedback. Our microfabricated actuator arrays could be used to
construct programmable parts-feeders (at any scale), or to build
self-propelled IC's (walking VLSI chips.) Graduate student Amy
Briggs worked with Dan Huttenlocher's vision group to develop a sensor planning and surveillance system for a team of
mobile robots. The robots use on-board vision to detect and
intercept targets in the lab.
Demos
Massively parallel micro-fabricated actuator arrays.
MPEG video of Tommy chasing Lily. Tommy and Lily are mobile robots we built. Using algorithms developed
by the
vision group in our
lab, Lily can track Tommy and follow him, using visual information
alone. This video shows Lily's view of the `chase.'
Face Morphing.
Selected Recent Publications
K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald, Upper and
Lower Bounds for Programmable Vector Fields with Applications to MEMS
and Vibratory Parts Feeders, International Workshop on the
Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, Toulouse, France (1996).
A.J. Briggs and B. R. Donald, Robust
Geometric Algorithms for Sensor Planning, International
Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, Toulouse,
France (1996).
K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald,
Single-Crystal Silicon Actuator Arrays for Micro Manipulation Tasks,
IEEE Workshop on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS),
San Diego, California (February 1996).
K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald,
Classification and Lower Bounds for MEMS Arrays and Vibratory Parts Feeders:
What Programmable Vector Fields Can (and Cannot) Do - Part I,
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),
Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 1996).
K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald,
New and
Improved Manipulation Algorithms for MEMS Arrays and Vibratory Parts
Feeders: What Programmable Vector Fields Can (and Cannot) Do - Part
II,
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA), Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 1996).
Provably
Good Approximation Algorithms for Optimal Kinodynamic Planning: Robots
with Decoupled Dynamics Bounds (with P. Xavier) Algorithmica
(Vol 14, no 6) (1995). pp. 443-479.
Provably
Good Approximation Algorithms for Optimal Kinodynamic Planning for
Cartesian Robots and Open Chain Manipulators (with P. Xavier)
Algorithmica (Vol 14, no 6) (1995). pp. 480-530.
.
Kinodynamic Motion Planning (with P. Xavier, J.
Canny, and J. Reif) Journal of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 5, Nov.,
1993. pp. 1048-1066.
Information Invariants for Distributed Manipulation (with J.
Jennings and D.
Rus) in International Journal of Robotics Research, (in
press) (1996).
B. R. Donald, J. Jennings, and D. Rus, Minimalism +
Distribution = Supermodularity , Journal of Experimental and
Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI), (in press) 1996.
. I am
writing a book entitled
Information Invariants in Robotics. A draft of the first
quarter of this book appeared as a paper in Artificial
Intelligence. Here it is:
Information Invariants in Robotics. Revised MS based on the paper
"On Information Invariants in Robotics," Artificial
Intelligence Vol. 72 (Jan, 1995) pp. 217-304.
Distributed Robotic Manipulation: Experiments in
Minimalism, in
International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, (ISER)
Stanford, CA (1995).
Moving Furniture with Teams of Automonous Mobile Robots, (with J.
Jennings and D.
Rus) in
Proc.~IEEE/Robotics Society of
Japan International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems, (IROS)
Pittsburgh, PA (1995).
Sensorless
Manipulation Using Massively Parallel Micro-fabricated Actuator
Arrays (with
K.-F. Böhringer, R. Mihailovich, and Noel C. MacDonald),
Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation, San Diego, CA (May, 1994).
A
demo and more detailed explanation.
.
Program Mobile Robots in Scheme(with J. Rees)
Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Nice, France (May, 1992), pp. 2681-2688.
Information Invariants for Distributed Manipulation (with J.
Jennings and D.
Rus) in
The First Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of
Robotics, A. K. Peters, Boston, MA. ed. R. Wilson and
J.-C.Latombe (1994).
Automatic Sensor Configuration for
Task-Directed Planning (with
Amy Briggs), Proceedings 1994
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Diego,
CA (May 1994).
Recent Theses and Papers of PhD Students
Patrick Xavier, PhD 1992. Except for the thesis, these TR's are
mostly superseded by three, more recent journal papers listed starting here.
Amy
Briggs, PhD 1994.
(Her Papers and Thesis).
Russell Brown, PhD 1995.
(His Papers and Thesis).
Jim Jennings.
Karl-F. Böhringer.
Post-Docs Trained in Our
Lab
Daniela Rus.
Jonathan Rees.
Dinesh Pai.
- More papers are avalable through the
Cornell CS TR server.
- Some other papers are listed here.
-
Cornell CS TR version of my Online Tech Reports
- Cornell Library Catalog
- CS TR index
Obtaining Copies of Papers
Copies of our papers are available via anonymous FTP.
Pictures
Our lab was on The Discovery
Channel ("Beyond 2000") and you can find out more about it here.
Fun
A Poem by Alfred, the Mail Agent.
Family Pictures.
More
Why I say click
here.
"You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."
--- Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray