** Warning: Dangerous Ideas ** ** Warning: Dangerous Ideas **
DANGEROUS IDEAS SEMINAR
April 30, 2003
1:00pm-2:00pm
NE43 - 8th Floor Playroom
Speaking this week:
Seth Teller
LCS/AI
Pervasive Pose-Awareness for People, Objects, and Robots
or
Empowering Robots to Clear Your Dining-Room Table
Abstract:
For humans, knowledge of our own location is a basic kind of empowering
information: as part of our mental model of the world, it allows us to
navigate to desired places, to find resources, and to plan our movements
more effectively. Until recently, people had to rely on experience and
continuity to locate themselves. However, in the past decade, cheap
position information from the Global Positioning System (GPS)
infrastructure has wrought tremendous change in human and robotic
activities ranging from military operations (including autonomous
aircraft), civilian navigation and surveying, to shipping and
supply-chain management, resource exploration, and precision
agriculture.
We envision an analogous infrastructure indoors to provide fine-grained
location and orientation ("pose") information to hand-held devices,
autonomous robots, and ordinary objects. This infrastructure will bring
about a revolution in indoor human and robotic activities. For people,
pose-awareness will allow direct interaction with things in the world
and their metadata. For robots, pose-awareness will enable tasks that
would otherwise seem out of reach, such as complex household chores beyond
pool-cleaning and vacuuming. I'll also sketch how, as a swarm of small
robots, our infrastructure can deploy itself autonomously throughout the
environment.
For more information on DIS, email dangerous-minds@ai.mit.edu
or check out the web page: http://www.ai.mit.edu/lab/dangerous-ideas/
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