James Ezick: Robotics

REU Researcher: James Ezick, SUNY Buffalo
Email: ezick@acsu.buffalo.edu
Mentor: Sven Dickinson
Email: sven@cs.rutgers.edu

Ezick worked with Prof. Sven Dickinson (Rutgers Computer Science) and a team of his graduate students on a problem in robotics. A key open problem in mobile robotics is to find a way to program a mobile robot to explore an environment and visually determine its position (coordinates). A promising approach is to have the robot first determine an optimal set of visual landmarks for navigation, then use the landmarks to find its position. The problem of finding the set of landmarks can be formulated as a graph coloring problem with special constraints introduced by the nature of the problem. The goal of his research was to design, implement, and/or test algorithms to solve this problem (at least for simplified environments).

To test the algorithms, Ezick first designed and implemented a simulator to create artificial indoor environments with visual landmarks. He then tested various algorithms using the simulator. The work on this project is still in progress, and Ezick is working on it back at his home school. It is hoped that soon, some of his more promising approaches can be tested on a mobile robot operating in a mock-up nuclear reactor in Canada.


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Last modified January 21, 1997.