Autonomous Observers Stanford CS Robotics Lab Our goal is to develop a mobile robot system in which the primary task is to observe. High-level operations, such as target tracking in cluttered environments and automatic map construction for virtual touring, can be requested by remote users across the internet. Our work involves the development and adaptation of motion planning and computer vision techniques to obtain real-time performance on our Nomad 200 mobile robots. To help the development and verification of our motion planning algorithms, we use The Motion Factory's Motivate software.

Researchers

Faculty/Staff:	Jean-Claude Latombe	latombe@cs.stanford.edu
Students:	Héctor González-Baños	hhg@flamingo.stanford.edu
	Cheng-Yu Lee	chengyu@robotics.stanford.edu
	David Lin	dlin@cs.stanford.edu
Remote Collaborators:	U. Penn. GRASP Lab	with Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy
	ITESM Monterrey, Mexico	with Prof. José Luis Gordillo
	Iowa State University	with Prof. Steven LaValle
	LAAS	with Rafael Murrieta (visitor)
	ITESM Monterrey, Mexico	with Alejandro Sarmiento
Visiting Scholar(s):	Patrick Fabiani	fabiani@flamingo.stanford.edu

Research Projects

• Videos of the experimental result appearing in "Real-Time Target Tracking in an Indoor Environment" (Dissertation of Cheng-Yu Lee, 2002)

• Real-Time Combinatorial Tracking of a Target Moving Unpredictably Among Obstacles (accepted in ICRA 2002)

• Motion Planning to Maintain Visibility of Moving Targets

• Visibility-Based Motion Strategies for Pursuing an Evading Target

• Automatic 2D and 3D Map Building

• WWW Interface to the Mobile Robots

• Tactical Mobile Robotics

• Application of Target Seeking Motion Planners

• 2-1/2-D Target Finding with a Helicopter

Related Publications

• Real-Time Combinatorial Tracking of a Target Moving Unpredictably Among Obstacles, (Accepted in ICRA 2002) Postscript version (gzip).
• Planning Robot Motion Strategies for Efficient Model Construction, presented at the 1999 Intl. Symp. on Robotics Research. Postscript version (gzip).
• The Autonomous Observer: A Tool for Remote Experimentation in Robotics , presented at the 1999 SPIE Intl. Symp. on Voice, Video, and Data Communications. Postscript version (gzip).
• Planning Robot Motion Strategies for Range-Image Acquisition and Automatic 3-D Model Construction, presented at the 1998 AAAI Fall Symposium Series: Integrated Planning for Autonomous Agent Architecture. Postscript version (gzip).
• Motion Planning Under Visibilities Constraints: Building Autonomous Observers, presented at 1997 Intl. Symp. on Robotics Research Postscript version (gzip).
• An Intelligent Observer , presented at ISER'95. Postscript version (gzip).
• Motion Strategies for Maintaining Visibility of a Moving Target , presented at ICRA'97. Postscript version (gzip).
• Finding an Unpredictable Target in a Workspace with Obstacles, presented at ICRA'97. Postscript version (gzip).
• Visibility-Based Pursuit-Evasion in a Polygonal Environment. Proc. 5th Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS'97). Postscript version (gzip).
• Tracking a Partially Predictable Object with Uncertainty and Visibility Constraints : A Game-Theoretic Approach, Internal Report. 1998. [ Postscript version (gzip) ]