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RI | People | John Dolan
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Text only version of this site
John Dolan
Senior Systems Scientist
Associated center: VASC
Email address: jmd@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: Biography | Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications
| Biography |
mobile robots, space robotics, human-computer interaction, teleoperation, mechatronics, control, factory automation
| Research interests |
My research goal is to create systems and methodologies that allow groups of robots and humans to collaborate with one another to perform useful tasks. My research is motivated by an interest in the modeling and control of physical systems on the one hand, and in the creation of effective human-machine interfaces on the other. Given continuing technological advances in computing, sensing, actuation, and miniaturization, I believe that the nexus of these two interests is an increasingly exciting area to explore.
The pursuit of this research involves two complementary thrusts. On the one hand, robot systems should be endowed with maximal autonomy. Perception, actuation, planning, and even tasking should be performed with the smallest amount of human intervention possible. Human attention and intelligence are then freed for supervisory and remedial actions that transcend the current competence of the robot or group of robots being controlled. On the other hand, human users should have increasingly effective means of tasking, controlling, and communicating with robots. Human control of robots then becomes less burdensome and more intuitive, and users are able to oversee more complex tasks with greater numbers of robots.
Telesupervisory human-robot systems. I want to build systems that allow maximally intuitive human input in controlling large numbers of machines with variable autonomy. The focus of my current NASA project ?Wide-Area Prospecting Using Supervised Autonomous Robots? is to create a telesupervision system that allows a single astronaut in a ?shirtsleeve? environment to control multiple rovers performing a prospecting task, increasing astronaut safety and productivity. This proposal presents an exciting opportunity to have a large impact in current NASA plans to search for water ice and important minerals on the moon, as outlined in the NASA Lunar Exploration Plan. At the same time, it provides a chance to build a telesupervision architecture applicable to a wide variety of tasks, to include exploration, space assembly, inspection, and maintenance. One of the project?s goals is to lay the groundwork for reversing the current rover control situation, in which multiple rover drivers and planners are dedicated to one rover. We will seek to make advances in rover hazard and assistance detection and high-fidelity telepresence and teleoperation, and will make a direct performance comparison to a single astronaut operating on a planetary surface.
Multi-modal human control. As robots enter the human environment and come in contact with inexperienced users, they need to be able to interact with users in an intuitive fashion - keyboard and mouse are no longer acceptable as the only input modalities. Humans should be able to communicate with robots using methods as similar as possible to the concise, rich, and diverse means they use to communicate with one another. Cooperation among humans is multi-modal and often intuitive, whereas current methods of cooperation among robots and between robots and humans, whether for programming or control, are generally highly specified and inflexible. Interesting research issues in this area include the selection, development, combination, and interpretation of appropriate input modalites (gesture, voice, touch, etc.) and the creation of usable, intuitive multi-modal programming and control systems.
Robot reliability. Mobile robots are typically unreliable. NASA has expressed interest in using modular self-repairable robotic teams for the exploration and colonization of Mars. The NASA Technology Plan 2001 states the need for ?vehicle systems technology developments that are extremely reliable, modular, offer long service life, are self-diagnosing, self-reconfiguring, self-maintaining, and self-repairing.? The use of modular, self-repairing robot teams adds new complexity to the mission design process for robotic exploration. Decisions must be made about how to divide tasks among multiple robots and how to configure the robots and teams to accomplish both individual tasks and overall mission goals. In order to do this, one needs methods to quantify the impact of mission design decisions on mission success. I am interested in using systems engineering reliability principles to answer questions like: "What is the lowest-cost configuration of robots that will accomplish a given set of mission tasks with a given probability of success?" This analysis allows comparison of teams of repairable vs. non-repairable robots, teams where the robots use components with different reliabilities, and teams with different numbers of robots and different numbers of spare parts.
| Research interest keywords |
control, factory and warehouse automation, human-computer interaction, mechatronics, mobile robots, space robotics, and teleoperation
| Current Labs & Groups |
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| Current Projects [Past projects] |
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| Recent publications [View all 48 publications] |
