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.
WebMaster: dimacs-www@dimacs.rutgers.edu
Last modified January 21, 1997.