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Mobile Robot Lab
This lab is no longer active.

Head: Hans Moravec

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Location:
NSH 2211

The Mobile Robot Laboratory is engaged in long-term basic research in perception, control and planning for robots that navigate through complex indoor and outdoor spaces. Since 1981, building on work conducted at Stanford University since 1973, the lab has built three dissimilar mobile robots (Pluto, Neptune and Uranus) and demonstrated new methods that allow them to map and navigate cluttered surroundings by stereo and monocular vision, by broad beam sonar, scanning laser rangefinder and other sensors.

The two decades of experience have given us the means and confidence to develop a mobile robot control program with enough spatial competence to reliably execute tasks like delivery and floor care in normal areas, with no special navigational aids and trained only by an initial run through. Our current efforts may result in a laboratory prototype of the first mobile robots with mass market potential.

Our approach accumulates sensed evidence about surrounding geometry in a spatial grid. We plan to integrate about ten thousand 3D location estimates from multi-baseline stereo vision several times per meter traveled. Preliminary, but very efficient, implementations of stereo and 3D grid algorithms suggest that 100 to 1000 MIPS of computer power will suffice to safely guide walking-speed robots through normal indoors. This amount of computing power will be inexpensive by the end of the decade, and we anticipate the widespread use of freely roaming robots shortly thereafter.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• Mike Blackwell - Senior Research Engineer
• Frank Dellaert - PhD Student, CS
• Kevin Dowling - Project Scientist
• Jesse Easudes - Visiting Engineer
• Martin C. Martin - PhD Student, RI
• Hans Moravec - Adjunct Faculty (Adjunct) <hpm@andrew.cmu.edu>
• Patrick Muir - Adjunct Research Scientist (Adjunct)
• [Home] Gregg Podnar - Program Manager <gwp@cmu.edu>
• [Home] Anthony (Tony) Stentz - Research Professor/Assoc Dir NREC <tony+@cmu.edu>
• Chuck Thorpe - Dean, Qatar Campus <thorpe@qatar.cmu.edu>
• Jie Yang - Senior Systems Scientist, CS <yang+@cs.cmu.edu>

• Daedalus - We deveopled Daedalus, a six-legged frame-walker with efficient redundant drive systems, for extreme terrain missions as part of the Lunar Rover Initiative.
• Neptune Mobile Robot - three wheeled robot trike
• Pluto - Flexible platform for computer vision
• Single Leg Testbed - We developed the Single Leg Testbed as a full-scale working prototype for the Ambler.
• Terregator - We developed the Terregator to serve as a testbed machine for a wide variety of projects.
• Uranus - mobile robot used for developing 3D mapping and sensing

• Evolving visual sonar: Depth from monocular images
  M.C. Martin
  Pattern Recognition Letters: Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Vol. 27, No. 11, August, 2006, pp. 1174 - 1180. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [187 KB] copyrighted

• Visual Obstacle Avoidance Using Genetic Programming: First Results
  M.C. Martin
  Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, July, 2001. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [228 KB] copyrighted

• Breaking Out of the Black Box: A New Approach to Robot Perception
  M.C. Martin
  Mobile Robots XIII, November, 1998, pp. 126 - 137. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [902 KB] copyrighted

• Breaking Out of the Black Box: A New Approach to Robot Perception
  M.C. Martin
  doctoral dissertation, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, January, 1998. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [518 KB], ps.gz [2195 KB] copyrighted

• Design of a Day / Night Lunar Rover
  P. Berkelman, M. Chen, J. Easudes, J. Hancock, M.C. Martin, A. Mor, E. Rollins, A. Sharf, J. Silberman, T. Warren, and D. Bapna
  tech. report CMU-RI-TR-95-24, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, June, 1995. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1108 KB], ps.gz [1843 KB] copyrighted

• NEPTUNE: Above ground Storage-Tank Inspection Robot System
  H. Schempf, B. Chemel, and N. Everett
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Magazine, June, 1995. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [665 KB], ps.gz [7342 KB] copyrighted

• Mobile Robot Navigation: The CMU System
  Y. Goto and A. Stentz
  IEEE Expert, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1987, pp. 44 - 55.
  Download: pdf [240 KB] copyrighted

• A Sophisticated Omni-Directional Vehicle for Autonomous Mobile Robot Research
  G. Podnar
  1986.

• Progress in Robot Road-Following
  R. Wallace, K. Matsuzaki, J. Crisman, Y. Goto, J. Webb, and T. Kanade
  Proc. of 1986 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 3, 1986, pp. 1615-1621. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [938 KB] copyrighted

• Experiments and Thoughts on Visual Navigation
  C. Thorpe, L. Matthies, and H. Moravec
  Proceedings of 1985 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 2, March, 1985, pp. 830 - 835. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [507 KB] copyrighted