Ms. Guidance on ROBOTICS

Robotics and Machine Vision at MIT

Computer Vision: The Computer Vision Group at the MIT AI Lab.

Cheap Vision Machine: The cheap vision machine is a project to develop affordable low resolution vision machines.

Mobile Robotics: The Mobile Robot Group at the MIT AI Lab.

Stanford Robotics Laboratory

The research is conducted on a number of core topics, including manipulation, machine learning, navigation, vision, tactile sensing, and reasoning. The goals of this research are to make robots both autonomous and dexterous, to increase the self-sufficiency of existing robots, and to enable robots to accomplish very delicate tasks. The Robotics Laboratory is currently directed by Professor Jean-Claude Latombe
1. Vision and Image Science and Technology (Heeger)
2. Mobile Robotics
3. N O B O T S (Koller, Nilsson and Shoham)
4. Stanford Vision Laboratory (Binford and Tomasi)

The Stanford Assistant Mobil Manipulator (SAMM)

SIMpact

SIMpact is a system currently under development to model and simulate the interactions between robots and their environments. The ability to preview the behavior of a robotic system in a "virtual" environment allows different mechanisms, configurations and controllers to be tested before being applied to a real physical system.

The objective of the Intelligent Machines and Robotics Lab is to give machines the ability to interact intelligently with the external physical world. To create intelligent machines, we need to understand the combination of action (control), perception (sensing), and planning.
Computational Vision: The goal of computational vision is to start with one or more video sequences of a scene and extract spatial information adequate to guide manipulation and navigation, as well as to recognize objects in the scene.

UC Berkeley Computer Vision Group

1. Road Watch: Machine Vision Based Traffic Surveillance.
2. Stereo Drive: Using Stereo Vision to Drive Autonomous Vehicles.
etc.

UC Berkeley Robotics Demos and Movies

The Field Robotics Center is part of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. T

Text Version of their Homepage.

FRC Projects: Amongst them you will find: RANGER, a software control system for cross country autonomous vehicles. The system has been used successfully on a converted U.S. Army jeep called the NAVLAB II and on a specialized Lunar Rover vehicle that may, one day, explore the moon.

A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation

Book by R. M. Murray, Z. X. Li, and S. S. Sastry (CRC Press, 1994).
The price of the book is $59.95 (slightly higher if you are outside the US).

Self-Organization in Large Populations of Mobile Robots by Cem Ünsal.

Currently, there is an increasing interest in multiple autonomous mobile robot systems due to their applicability to various tasks such as space missions, operations in hazardous environments, and military operations. Such systems bring in the problems of both multiple robot coordination and autonomous navigation. Again, multiple mobile robots may be controlled by using a hierarchical (central) controller. However, tasks mentioned above obviously require many robots which are able to navigate autonomously. It is difficult to use a central controller or a hierarchical method, sometimes because of the large distances, sometimes due to robustness and versatility problems.