Overview: The focus of my
current interests is artificial hand/eye coordination and vision-based
robotics. In particular, I'd like to know the best way to tell a robot what to
do and ensure it gets done.
Why worry about how to tell a robot what to do? The motivation comes from the
simple observation that robots can do things and people have things to
do. If these two sides - task specification and task execution -
can communicate, things will get done.
Since robots have always been
told what to do, why isn't the problem already solved? The problem is solved only
for robots which blindly follow commands to move from position to position -
the kinds of robots used to assemble cars, for example. However, the rapidly
maturing field of visual servoing has enabled robotic systems to act on what
they "see" in their environment. When a robot and a human are looking at the same
thing, it isn't obvious how to translate the human's intentions into robotic
action. What is it we want the robot to see? To date, people have borne all of the burden of answering this question. Similar to the early days of computing, in which programmers painstakingly wrote (or punched) each elementary instruction in machine code, visual tasks are often specified by deciding exactly how each visual feature should look when the task is accomplished.
Certainly, a robot will depend on this low level of feature interaction to
perform a task successfully, just as machine instructions continue to run the
world's computers. Our goal is to push more of the work of generating those
task-specific details onto the computer itself - in the spirit of the
compilers and development environments which facilitate software programming
today.
The following links offer greater detail on our approaches to this project, as well as some related (and unrelated) work in vision-based robotics.
Papers Available A number of papers on this and other work are available
in postscript and/or HTML form.
Thesis Page and Thesis Movies are available (in mpeg form).
Linux Device Driver for the Zebra Zero 6 DOF Robot I have developed
an interface to the motor control board of IMI's Zebra Zero Robot under
Linux. This allowed for considerably easier networking than the supplied
DOS-based system. The code is available.