The eighth installment of the CSE Colloquium Series features Dr. Gregory Dudek on Friday, February 28. There is a reception beginning at 3:30 p.m. in Schorr on the second floor prior to the lecture. Dr. Dudek will give his presentation also in Schorr at 4 p.m. immediately following the reception.
In his lecture titled “Robot Teams to Assist Humans in Scientific Discovery,” Dr. Gregory Dudek will present his research. His research deals with sensing for robots, intelligent systems human-robot interaction, and the development of underwater and amphibious robots. He is the Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University, Director of the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network, and James McGill Chair.
Abstract:
I have been working with my students on the development of robots that can operate in outdoor environments, and particularly in shallow water (littoral environments) using the Aqua2 hexapod robot. Most recently, we have examined the use of robots to survey shallow water coral reefs working in teams or with human guidance. This work entails coordination between flying and swimming vehicles, as well as interaction with human scuba divers. Due to the complexity of the environment and inherent communication limitations, the problems of multi-robot rendezvous, human-robot interaction, and dynamic task repartitioning all must be taken into consideration.
One key aspect of this problem is the automated selection of the most salient and notable features of the environment, to make the best use of the limited available bandwidth. We are specifically interested in the real-time summarization and detection of the most interesting events in a video sequence, for use by humans who will analyze the data either in real time, or offline. This selection process is driven by an unsupervised topic learning framework that operates in real time. The results of this effort to date seem to have potential utility not only in environmental assessment, which has been our primary target application, but to a range of potential robotics applications.