Douglas.Reece@IUS1.CS.CMU.EDU (05/05/88)
Re Request by John Nagle and Gary Cottrell for information about the CMU Terregator successor: 1. The current robot testbed is a vehicle called the Navlab. It was built from a large Chevrolet van/truck and is completely self-contained, including propulsion, electrical power, computers and sensors. It is being driven on paved paths (it is too big for sidewalks). Current research is addressing vision, control, and architecture. More details can be found from documents like Shafer, Stenz, and Thorpe, "An Architecture for Sensor Fusion in a Mobile Robot," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1986 CMU Robotics Institute Tech Reports on Strategic Computing Project, Road Following, Navlab, etc. Thorpe et al, "Vision and Navigation for the Carnegie-Mellon Navlab," Annual Review of Computer Science, Vol 2, 1987, pp 521-56 2. Dean Pomerleau's network did a nice job of identifying and locating a road in synthesized noisy images. He has not yet tried it on the range of (real) images that the vision/Navlab group has used. I suspect that with some more work he will be able to find roads in more difficult images. He has not tried to identify intersections. Although his network produces some very simple control outputs, he has not tried to actually control a vehicle. Doug Reece dreece@ius1.cs.cmu.edu