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Underwater and Amphibious Robotics using Vision-Based Robotic Behavior

Dr. Gregory Dudek
Friday, March 30, 2007
11:30AM ~ 12:45PM Harris Center 101

Abstract


We have been developing an underwater vehicle for several applications, notably the environmental assessment of coral reefs habitats. Semi- autonomous behavior underwater is especially challenging since it combined 6 degree of freedom mobility, restricted communications, hard real-time constraints and unstructured environments. In this presentation I will describe the system design of a small underwater and amphibious robot that uses computer vision as its principal sensing modality, and some of the ongoing challenges we have encountered. I will outline the manner in which we accomplish operator control of the vehicle using a vision- based human-robot interface, the use of Markov Random Fields for color correction (and, we hope, for scene reconstruction) and comment on the use of physical feedback for behavior control and the development of a vision-based user interface.

Short Bio


Gregory Dudek is an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science, and an Associate member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at McGill University. He is the Director of McGill's Research Center for Intelligent Machines, a 20 year old inter-faculty research facility. In 2002 he was named a William Dawson Scholar (an honorary chair). He directs the McGill Mobile Robotics Laboratory.

He has recently been on the organizing and/or program committees of Robotics: Systems and Science, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Computer and Robot Vision, IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics (ICM2005) and International Conference on Hands-on Intelligent Mechatronics and Automation (HIMA2005) among other bodies. He is president of CIPPRS, the Canadian Information Processing and Pattern Recognition Society, an ICPR national affiliate.

He was on leave in 2000-2001 as Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He obtained his PhD in computer science (computational vision) from the University of Toronto, his MSc in computer science (systems) at the University of Toronto and his BSc in computer science and physics at Queen's University.

He has published over 150 research papers on subjects including visual object description and recognition, robotic navigation and map construction, distributed system design and biological perception. This includes a book entitled "Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics" co-authored with Michael Jenkin and published by Cambridge University Press. He has chaired and been otherwise involved in numerous national and international conferences and professional activities concerned with Robotics, Machine Sensing and Computer Vision. He research interests include perception for mobile robotics, navigation and position estimation, environment and shape modelling, computational vision and collaborative filtering.

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