Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It's hard to believe I get paid to play with robots all day
Robots can have a huge societal impact whether they're helping soldiers safely
explore an urban environment, helping first responders find people who need
help in a crisis situation, or company elderly, as they go about their ordinary lives
trying to encourage social and physical activity
One of the problems that really interests my group is how to make
teams of robots much more robust to the types of errors that they might encounter in the
real world. These sorts of errors can often times cause huge problems in terms of
maintaining a good map of the environment
We built a team of fourteen robots which ultimately won the Magic 2010 competition
The robots worked together to complete an urban reconnaissance mission
building a map looking for improvised explosive devices and communicating this
information in real time to a human commander
The work that we do for robotics is actually applicable to a lot of systems
that might not ordinarily be considered robots. We're working with the
Federal Railway Administration to build a system capable of detecting unsafe
railroad crossings, where there's insufficient sight line due to
vegetation growth or *** crossing where a truck might get hung up
We're using a combination of laser and video data in order to detect and identify
these dangerous crossings
I think the most important thing for roboticists to learn is that
theory really matters
A fundamental understanding of a problem leads to a better engineered system
And both with my teaching and with my students, we really emphasize both
concepts and application