The Robotics Institute

My research interests are in robot perception; more specifically, VLSI computational sensors and computer vision. I am interested in creating miniature, intelligent, task-oriented, self-contained, integrated sensing and processing components that enable a machine (e.g., an autonomous vehicle) to coherently interact with a changing environment and/or human user.

Perception plays a dominant role in an intelligent system -- an animal or machine. Computational sensors mimic one aspect of biological systems: they tightly integrate computation and sensing to improve performance and achieve new capabilities. The computational sensor is a new and exciting concept that offers a range of research topics:

• algorithms: discovering new sensing and computing strategies
  
• VLSI design: implement these strategies by designing and fabricating analog/digital integrated circuits sensitive to a stimulus (e.g., light, sound, etc.)
  
• applications; apply these integrated circuits in a system that intelligently interacts with the environment and/or human.
  

The sensors I have built so far are vision sensors. They detect images and compute useful quantities from those images very quickly. My specific projects include: a sorting computational sensor which senses an image and sorts pixel values by their intensities, a tracking computational sensor which selects and tracks visual stimulus within the field of view, an eye tracking computational sensor, and a road-following computational sensor.