Who We Are

The mobile robotics and shape recognition group is an informal grouping of people and projects at the Centre for Intelligent Machines. The key theme is sensor-based robotics and the use and understanding of sensor data. The group has at least 6 mobile robots sporting a collection of sensors including sonar, video, lidar (laser ranging), BIRIS, and infra-red reflectance, depending on the current experiments in progress. The primary computing resources employ the Linux, IRIX and SUNOS operating systems, and a few other computing devices integrated into the general CIM computing environment. This group is involved in issues of form representation and discovery. This relates specifically to the:

• exploration and representation of unknown environments using mobile robots,
• the representation and recognition of objects. and
• the application of mathematical models similar to those used in our robotics research to projects that don't involve robots per se (i.e. texture synthesis and sketch elaboration).

Key technical foci are the abstraction of shape models across scale, the relationship between signals and symbolic descriptions. Projects with which we are preoccupied include: robot pose estimation (i.e. localization), place recognition, sketch elaboration, extrapolation of image and range data, efficient exploration strategies, robot rendezvous, multi-robot collaboration, map representation, map merging and navigation.

Localize