Autonomous Observer Group Status Page
Maintained by Héctor González-Baños
and David Lin
Autonomous Observers are mobile robots that cooperatively perform
vision tasks. Their design raises new issues in motion planning, where
visibility constraints and motion obstructions must be simultaneously
taken into account. An autonomous observer accepts high-level
directives from a remote user in order to perform tasks such as target
tracking in cluttered
environments, pursuit-evasion in polygonal environments, and automatic
3-D model construction.
We have succesfully employed an autonomous observer as a robotic
tool for experimentation among geographically dispersed groups.
The Stanford-Monterrey demo status roster
Sytem Architecture
General problems, comments, or notices:
- August 4, 1996: New color and grey-scale cameras arrived with power supplies.
Camera power connectors available on the robots.
- Roaming area recently expanded with more landmarks.
- June 1996: Acquire color CCD camera, new grayscale CCD, Matrox
Meteor RGB frame grabber.
- August 4, 1996: Got power upgrade on both robots. Batteries can be
recharged without shutting down the onboard computers.
- September, 1997: Upgraded Nomad200's lower CPU hang all the time.
Memnet is the suspect. (It was actually a bad CPU board).
- September, 1997: Made possible to grab three images simultaneously
through the RGB channels using Carlo Tomasi's junction boxes and
synchronizing the cameras.
- September, 1998: Ordered 3 SuperScout II Robots from Nomadics.
- December 8, 1998: Received 3 SuperScout II Robots.
- January 8, 1999: SuperScouts shutting down switching between battery and AC power. Returned one SuperScout to Nomadics for diagnostics.
- January 19, 1999: SuperScout returned from Nomadics with new
'backpack' to hold 2 more small batteries and to stablize the robot.
hhg@flamingo.stanford.edu
Last modified: Mon Jan 11 19:34:55 1999