Projects
Robotic Object Recognition
I believe the robots of tomorrow will need a richer understanding of their world in order to be really useful for humans. My PhD project involves developing semantic visual understanding for robots. [Curious George], our embodied object recognition platform has entered the [Semantic Robot Vision Challenge], an international contest requiring robots to find items in the world based on training data collected automatically from the internet and placed first in the robot league of the SRVC for 2007 and 2008 and won the software league in the most recent 2009 contest.
Geo-Spatial Intelligent Decision Systems for Disaster Management
Rapid access to information is essential during disaster situations. At [GEOSYS Technology Solutions], I've been developing an automated surveillance system that collects aerial images using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), transfers and processes these images in realtime, and delivers an up-to-date view of the situation to disaster managers. Sub-problems in this project include automated feature matching and bundle adjustment to recover accurate vehicle pose information, and a pipelined (parallel) image processing architecture to deliver data as rapidly as possible.
Check out my project page for an update on the most recent work on UAV mapping [here].
Mapping of a Camera Sensor Network with a Mobile Robot (ongoing collaboration related to comleted MSc thesis)
At McGill University's [Mobile Robotics Laboratory], I worked on a project which utilized images from static cameras in an environment (such as a building security system) to aid a mobile robot with mapping and navigation, as well as allowing a map of the camera locations to be constructed. We're continuing to collaborate on this project as it's proven to be an excellent test scenario to explore robust position inference methods, and planning approaches that allow a robot to explore an environment with minimal uncertainty in its resulting map estimates.