I am interested in developing robotic systems to do interesting things.  I am very interested in robot navigation, which has been a theme of my research throughout my career.  I  have worked on robots that have driven on roads and sidewalks early in my career. 

Computer vision plays a central role in robot navigation, just as human vision plays a key role in our navigation.  Therefore, I am very interested in fast computer vision techniques that enable a robot to see well enough to move around without hitting other objects.  I am also extremely interested in how deaf people navigate and trying to imitate these strategies on a robot.

I am also interested in how we could build a "general-purpose" robot to work with a person to reliably perform a task.  In developing this system, I look at what robots do well and assign these tasks to the robot.  These include low level motion generation and reflexive reactions to the environment.  People do the tasks that they do very well, such as object recognition and path planning. 

One of the reasons that I want to focus on human-robot systems is that I believe that it gives us a great path to integrate undergraduate research with my robotics program.  I am now building a base human/robot system which I call RoboScout.  In this system, the person selects a target in a video image and tells the robot how to move relative to that target.  The robot them performs the motion and then waits for the next commands.  It is my goal to implement this system on a wheelchair.

As students will approach me for research topics, I will have them use the current version of our human/robot system for a day and they will report back, "Oh, this was great, but it was very frustrating to do X."  Then constructing a better human/robot system to do X will become their research project.  In this manner, I hope to build up capabilities and then to generalize them into layers of intelligence for the robot and a higher level interface between the human and the robot.

I am thrilled to to working with Gill Pratt who is interested in developing walking robots and snake robots.