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Omead Amidi
Senior Systems Scientist

Associated center: VASC

Email address: omead.amidi@cs.cmu.edu

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

For more information, see my personal homepage.

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

Research interests

My goal is to build vision-guided autonomous flying robots. Vision allows such robots to serve as intelligent eyes-in-the-sky suitable for numerous applications including law enforcement, search and rescue, aerial mapping and inspection, and movie making. Vision for flight control encompasses a broad range of research areas. In particular, I am interested in vision-based object detection and tracking, optical position estimation, inertial navigation, GPS, and non-linear system modeling. I am the co-founder (with Takeo Kanade) of the Autonomous Helicopter Laboratory where we have developed a number of autonomous helicopters for our ongoing research in such areas. We have developed two six degree-of-freedom testbeds for indoor helicopter control experiments. In addition, we have built two fully autonomous helicopters for outdoor vision-guided flight research. These prototypes are mid-sized (14 ft. long) crop dusters outfitted with custom-designed vision systems and an array of sensors including accelerometers, angular sensors, and GPS receivers. Each can fly autonomously using an on-board visual odometer which estimates motion by locking-on to and visually tracking ground objects. In addition, we have integrated inertial and angular sensors and a GPS receiver with vision for high quality position estimation allowing autonomous landing, takeoff, and smooth trajectory following. Currently, we are developing a number of new flight systems. In particular, we are developing real-time object trackers for high speed aerial pursuit, compact laser scanners for obstacle detection and 3D mapping, and versatile control systems for transitioning to high-speed flight maneuvers.

This section last updated - January 1999.

Research interest keywords

biological vision

Current Labs & Groups

Helicopter Lab - A vision-guided robot helicopter which can function in any weather conditions using only on-board intelligence and computing power.
 

Current Projects

Autonomous Helicopter - Develop a vision-guided robot helicopter
PerceptOR (NREC) - We have developed a novel semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that includes a dedicated unmanned air vehicle - a "Flying Eye" - that flies ahead of the UGV to detect hazards before the onboard UGV sensors would.
Reconfigurable Vision Machine - Developing new hardware and software for high performance computer vision.
 

Recent publications [View all 22 publications]

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