- From 1996-99 I worked on vision based control of mobile robots
at the UPenn GRASP laboratory:
- Around 1997 I had a Lego based robot with omnidirectional vision working pretty well. It could track and
follow colored objects,
and compute its position to the nearest mm, all using vision. Here is a
movie.
This was joint work with Harris Romanoff and Chris Geyer.
- In the next generation, we chose to try using some RC vehicles, which would be more robust
than our first choice of Lego. Aveek Das mounted the spherical mirror on a
clodbuster ,
and we were ready to go in any environment! This example is teleoperated. Later John Spletzer
did an amazing job of making these things autonomous. Kostas Daniilidis was project leader.
This work ultimately evolved into the MARS project.
- The project then morphed into getting a robot to climb stairs. In this movie , the clodbuster climbs
some wooden stairs that Aveek built, first shown with a standard camera, then with a spherical
mirror based panoramic camera. The spherical mirror is a bit of overkill here. Note the cardboard
framing of the mirror, and the plastic box that holds the mirror up. The box, from Arch Street Plastics
(sadly gone) has almost no specular reflection. You can see the edges just a little bit.
-
Finally,
this movie shows an RC tank equipped with my
rectifying mirror for the stair climbing.
Thanks
here go to Sang Hack Jung for image processing.
- A
movie from 1999 of me playing with a rectifying mirror.
Last modified Sat Nov 12 13:28:21 EST 2011
