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

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