• Introduction
• People
• Projects
• Software
• Graduate Studies
• Media
• Bibliography
• Links
• Back to Research Page
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Introduction

The mobile robotics and shape recognition group is an informal grouping of people and projects at the centre. The group has at least 6 mobile robots sporting a collection of sensors including sonar, video, BIRIS, and infra-red reflectance, depending on the current experiments in progress. The primary computing resources employ the Linux, IRIX and SUNOS operating systems, and a few other computing devices integrated into the general CIM computing environment.

Note that while most of the links in this page are local to your CD, a few point to outside sources and, as such, you will require internet access to view them.

This group is involved in issues of form representation and discovery. This relates specifically to the

• exploration and representation of unknown environments using mobile robots,
• and the representation and recognition of objects.

Key technical foci are the abstraction of shape models across scale, the relationship between signals and symbolic descriptions. Projects that we are preoccupied with include: robot pose estimation (i.e. localization), place recognition, efficient exploration strategies, robot rendezvous, multi-robot collaboration, map representation, map merging and navigation.

A typical prosaic objective is to create a robot than can learn your office layout over the weekend:

People

This is a shot of a few of us in the lab. From left to right: Robert Sim, Scott Burlington, Deeptiman Jugessur, Gregory Dudek, Ioannis Rekleitis, Francois Belair, Richard Unger, Sandra Polifroni, Eric Bourque, L. Abril Torres-Mendez, and Michel Taix (visiting from LAAS).

If you have the Quicktime VR plugin, here's a movie of our group.

Projects

You can get more information several current or recent research projects. Several of these project descriptions have on-line publications accompanying them. Most work here is carried out by graduate students, through faculty collaboration, or in the context of undergraduate term projects, as well as by occasional post-doctoral researchers. This includes work on robot position estimation, navigation, exploration, and multi-robot collaboration.

Software

We have several tools available for use, including the McGill Mobile Robotics Architecture (MMRA) development environment. This environment includes Robodaemon, a mobile robot controller and simulator for a variety of standard mobile robot platforms.

Graduate studies

If you want to apply to be a grad student working in this group, you can get further information from the School of Computer Science. Note that CIM is not an "academic unit" and different faculty are officially associated with different departments.

Media