Cognitive Robotics Final Project Ideas for 2010
Improved Speech Generation For More Expressive Robots
Jill Doty and Nia Austin
Tekkotsu uses the Mary text to speech system; see http://mary.dfki.de. Mary includes
options for modulating speech (volume, pitch, tempo, application of
various filters) that Tekkotsu does not presently make use of. This
project will improve the Tekkotsu-Mary interface to give users greater
control over generated speech.
Play Tic-Tac-Toe Using the Grasper
Chris Freeman and Winston Wan
This project can be done using the Mirage simulator. The goal is to
play tic-tac-toe using a robot arm, either the Chiara's arm, or the
Tekkotsu planar hand/eye system. The point of the project is to show
how using the Grasper makes it easy to code manipulation applications.
You may need to develop some extensions to the Grasper to complete the
project.
Navigating With Pillar Landmarks
Owen Traeholt
Imagine an empty plain with two navigation markers: an orange traffic
cone and a green pop bottle. In principle this should be simple: make
a map with the two landmarks, and then use them to localize the robot
as it moves around. In practice it's not that simple. Since we don't
have range information, we need to see where the landmarks reach the
ground, but if we're up close agains the landmarks their bases may not
be visible. Another issue is occlusion: in certain viewing positions
only one of the two landmarks will be fully visible. And in other
positions, where the landmarks flank the object, only one will be
visible at a time. The challenge is to make the robot into a a robust
landmark tracker that extracts as much information as possible to
localize and navigate effectively.
Denavit-Hartenberg Kinematics Wizard
Nick Buroojy and Owen Greeley
Last year Leland Thorpe wrote the first
version of a DH kinematics wizard: a Java-based interactive tool
for displaying kinematic descriptions of robots using the
Denavit-Hartenberg conventions and Tekkotsu .kin files. This project
will extend the wizard to allow users to create new robot descriptions
and display the resulting kinematic chains as 3D structures in the
Mirage simulator.
Mirage World Builder
Daniel Lagrotta and Robert Lee
Mirage is a virtual reality simulator for Tekkotsu, built on the
OGRE3D rendering system and the Bullet physics engine. Mirage reads a
world description as an XML file and allows the simulated robot to
wander around in that world. This project will develop a simple
language for laying out worlds (objects, landmarks, walls), and a Perl
script to translate this language into an XML description that Mirage
can read. The project will also produce documentation and example
files so that others can learn to use this tool.
Collaborative Map Building
Thomas Tuttle and Rebecca Lambert
In this project, two robots will cooperate to construct a world map by sharing
their observations as they explore an environment.
ARTag Visual Markers
ARTags (Augmented Reality Tags) are
markers that can be recognized by a vision algorithm that recovers not
only the tag number, but its position and orientation in space, making
the tags useful as navigation landmarks. This project will import
into Tekkotsu an implementation of ARTags from the April laboratory of
Professor Edwin Olson at the University of Michigan, and implement
Shape<ARTagData> as part of the dual-coding vision system. Then
show how the markers can be used by Tekkotsu's particle filter to
localize the robot.
Using the OpenCV Face Tracker
Last year Ilya Matiach did a proof
of concept demonstration that the OpenCV face tracker could be
made to work with Tekkotsu. This project would build upon that work
to implement a Chiara version of Kismet style human-robot interaction:
reacting to human faces in various ways.
Using SIFT for Object Recognition
This project will use the SIFT tool to train up models of a small
number of objects, and then demonstrate that the robot can detect
those objects when it encounters them at random locations in the
playpen.
Invent a Project of Your Own
Many student projects are self-designed. You will need to confer with
me to assure that your proposed project is feasible and get it
approved. I will be happy to work with you on this.
Dave Touretzky
Last modified: Thu Apr 8 01:44:39 EDT 2010