1.Vision: Extraordinary Computing Experiences & 2. Robots for the Masses: Fiction or Reality

October 6, 2004
Paolo Pirjanian | Chief Scientist, Evolution Robotics, Inc.

Part I: Vision: Extraordinary Computing Experiences
Imagine walking into a room with your camera phone, seeing a book you like, and in one snap of the camera the book is yours. This and many other applications are closer to reality today than ever before thanks to advancements in mobile computing, wireless technologies, and computer vision. In this talk, I will discuss computer vision technologies that enable such extraordinary computing experiences and the tremendous business potential that this introduces.

I will describe ViPR™ an algorithm for Visual Pattern Recognition which provides a robust solution to several fundamental and longstanding computer vision problems including the correspondence problem and reliable object recognition. I will give examples of how this technology can be used for a wide variety of applications for shopping, working, and playing.

For shopping, I will describe LaneHawk™, a retail loss-prevention solution consisting of a camera mounted on the side of the checkout aisle to monitor the bottom of the shopping cart items that the cashier may have forgotten to ring up. For camera phone applications I will give examples of how the camera could become a one-snap interface to connecting the real world to the world-wide-web. Finally, I will discuss how ViPR could support a visual interface for Xbox and Sony AIBO® for game-play and entertainment.

These examples represent the tip of the iceberg for what we believe is possible with these new generation vision technologies and the potential business opportunities that they create.

Part II: Robots for the Masses: Fiction or Reality
Over the recent years we have witnessed a growing number of robotic technologies make their way into the consumer market. These interactive, talking and walking toys and autonomous vacuum cleaners may not be viewed as robots but they bring robotics to the mass consumer market in subtle ways. Do these robotic products represent the early stages of an emerging consumer robotics industry that may grow as large as the PC industry?

It can be argued that the growth of the robotics industry can be accelerated by a set of common, core technology components including navigation, human-robot interaction, and system architecture. I will describe how we have used vision for developing a cost-effective visual simultaneous localization and mapping technology called vSLAM™ for short. vSLAM enables an autonomous robot to build a visual map of the environment consisting of a database of ‘locations’ that it can recognize later to estimate its position. I will describe NorthStar™ , an optical sensing technology for indoor localization that introduces a breakthrough in price-performance for autonomous navigation. Finally, I will describe the Evolution Robotics Software Platform, ERSP™, a standard software platform for application development.

These core technologies are key building blocks for developing powerful robot applications at the right price point for the consumer market.

Speaker Details

Paolo Pirjanian is the Chief Scientist at Evolution Robotics, Inc and heads the R&D efforts in developing core technologies for consumer and commercial robotics products. His main work is focused around vision-based and optical navigation, control architectures, and human-robot interaction. Paolo has served as a part-time lecturer at the Computer Science department of University of Southern California. Prior to joining Evolution Robotics, Paolo initiated several research thrusts on multi-robot system for space exploration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA. He received his Ph.D. degree in robotics from Aalborg University, Denmark where he also served as a research professor. He received an Outstanding Technical Leadership Award from JPL, NASA for technical leadership in developing advanced robot architectures for planetary outposts in 2001. He received the IEEE RAS Industry Early Career Award in 2004. Paolo serves on the IEEE Industrial Activities Committee and the Editorial Board of Autonomous Robots Journal.