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Chuck Thorpe
Dean, Qatar Campus

Associated center: VASC

Email address: thorpe@qatar.cmu.edu
Office: QATAR1 C167
Phone: +97-4-492-8267
Fax: +97-4-492-7147

Mailing address:
Qatar Office SMC 1070
5032 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15289

For appointments, please contact:
Ruth Gaus, riw@cs.cmu.edu, 011-974-492-8274 or (412) 894 7924

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Additional Interests and Responsibilities | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

My goal is to build vehicles that can drive. I work with both autonomous vehicles and intelligent teleoperation; with ground vehicles and with air vehicles; with perception and architectures and human factors.

For many years, my group concentrated on autonomous driving with the Navlab vehicles. Now, in the Navlab work we are placing more emphasis on driver assistance, such as helping bus drivers drive safely through crowded urban areas.

Our latest research vehicle is the Navlab 11, a robot jeep. Contrary to popular opinion, a flashy red jeep with lots of chrome is not a sign of midlife crisis; the chrome light bar and brush guard are high-tech mounting points for the various sensors we use, including ladar (3 of them simultaneously), light stripe rangefinder, radar, sonar, and omnicamera.

computer vision, human-computer interaction, mobile robots, stereo vision, and teleoperation

While I am still a member of the Robotics Institute faculty, my current main job is Dean of the Carnegie Mellon branch campus in Doha, Qatar. The Navlab group keeps on doing research in Pittsburgh, but it is very difficult for me to supervise Pittsburgh-based graduate students. Instead, I go to the camel races and watch the robot camel jockeys.

In my non-professional life, I run, bike, and accumulate frequent flyer miles.

• NavLab - Autonomous Vehicles and Driver Assistance
• TechBridgeWorld - TechBridgeWorld innovates and implements technology solutions to meet sustainable development needs around the world.

• Intelligent Diabetes Assistant - We are working to create an intelligent assistant to help patients and clinicians work together to manage diabetes at a personal and social level. This project uses machine learning to predict the effect that patient specific behaviors have on blood glucose.

• Intelligent Diabetes Assistant: Using Telemedicine to Assist Diabetes Management
  D. Duke, C. Thorpe, and M. Mahmoud
  International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology, November, 2007.

• Robust Real-Time Local Laser Scanner Registration with Uncertainty Estimation
  J.D. Carlson, C. Thorpe, and D. Duke
  International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, July, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [488 KB] copyrighted

• Simultaneous Localization, Mapping and Moving Object Tracking
  C. Wang, C. Thorpe, M. Hebert, S. Thrun, and H. Durrant-Whyte
  The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 26, No. 6, June, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [3854 KB] copyrighted

• Robotics in Early Undergraduate Education
  D. Duke, J.D. Carlson, and C. Thorpe
  AAAI Symposium on Robotics in AI and CS Education, March, 2007. [Abstract]

• Collision Warning and Sensor Data Processing in Urban Areas
  C. Mertz, D. Duggins, J. Gowdy, J. Kozar, R. MacLachlan, A. Steinfeld, A. Suppe, C. Thorpe, and C. Wang
  Proceedings of the 5th international conference on ITS telecommunications, June, 2005, pp. 73-78. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [259 KB], ps.gz [308 KB] copyrighted

• A Hierarchical Object Based Representation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
  C. Wang and C. Thorpe
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September, 2004. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [521 KB] copyrighted

• Development of the Side Component of the Transit Integrated Collision Warning System
  A. Steinfeld, D. Duggins, J. Gowdy, J. Kozar, R. MacLachlan, C. Mertz, A. Suppe, C. Thorpe, and C. Wang
  IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2004, pp. 343-348. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [187 KB] copyrighted

• Perception for collision avoidance and autonomous driving
  R. Aufrere, J. Gowdy, C. Mertz, C. Thorpe, C. Wang, and T. Yata
  Mechatronics, Vol. 13, No. 10, December, 2003, pp. 1149-1161. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1186 KB] copyrighted

• Safe Robot Driving in Cluttered Environments
  C. Thorpe, J.D. Carlson, D. Duggins, J. Gowdy, R. MacLachlan, C. Mertz, A. Suppe, and C. Wang
  Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium of Robotics Research, October, 2003. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [349 KB] copyrighted

• PdaDriver: A Handheld System for Remote Driving
  T.W. Fong, C. Thorpe, and B. Glass
  IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics 2003, IEEE, July, 2003. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1951 KB] copyrighted