Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)
A Location Infrastructure for Direct
Human and Robotic Interaction with the World
Seth Teller
EECS Department and CS & AI Laboratory
MIT
Monday, April 26, 2004, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
For humans, knowledge of our own location is a basic kind of empowering
information: as part of our mental model of the world, it enables us to
navigate to desired places, to find resources, and to plan our movements
more effectively. Until recently, people had to rely on experience and
continuity to locate themselves. However, in the past decade, position
information from the Global Positioning System (GPS) infrastructure has
wrought tremendous change in human and robotic activities outdoors,
ranging from military operations (including autonomous aircraft),
civilian navigation and surveying, to shipping and supply-chain
management, resource exploration, and precision agriculture.
We envision an analogous indoor infrastructure to provide fine-grained
location and orientation ("pose") information to human-held devices,
autonomous robots, and even ordinary objects. This infrastructure has
the potential to bring about a revolution in indoor human and robotic
activity. For people, pose-awareness facilitates direct interaction
with things in the world and their metadata. For robots, pose-awareness
makes feasible tasks that are currently out of reach, such as complex
household chores beyond pool-cleaning and vacuuming.
After motivating the infrastructure, we'll show some early deployments
and proof-of-concept applications, and briefly discuss privacy concerns.
We'll also show some early efforts toward making the infrastructure
deploy itself autonomously.
About the Speaker
Seth Teller is a member of the EECS Department and Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. His research
combines computer graphics, machine vision, computational geometry,
robotics, sensor networks and pervasive computing.
Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
Back to the Colloquium Page