Networked Robots

Prof. Ken Goldberg

Univeristy of California, Berkeley

Date: Friday, January 13, 2006
Place: Engineering Sciences Building, 1001
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm (Refreshments served at 1:30 pm)

Abstract:
This talk presents new results for robots collaboratively controlled by many humans via a network such as the Internet. The Tele-Actor is a system that combines a human agent with Internet-based distributed audience control. I'll describe a new "unsupervised scoring" algorithm that rewards active participation in the system, and a formal model of collaborative control that is robust to disturbances such as drop-outs, randomness, time-delay, and malicious audience behavior. This model suggests insight into the empirical success of audience participation systems such as Cinematrix.

In our newest system, the Co-Opticon, $n$ users share control of a single robotic pan, tilt, zoom camera. We propose the Intersection over Maximum (IOM) metric for the degree of satisfaction for each user, which improves over the standard Intersection Over Union (IOU) metric. We formulate the frame selection problem and present several algorithms, $O(n^2 m)$for a set of $m$ zoom levels, and $O((n + 1/\epsilon^3) log^2 n)$ for an infinite set of zoom levels. The algorithms can be distributed to run in $O(n m)$ time at each client and in $O(n \log n)$ time at the server.

Dez Song, Judith Donath, Sariel Har-Peled, Vladlen Koltun, and Frank van der Stappen have contributed to this work.

KEN GOLDBERG is Professor of IEOR and EECS at UC Berkeley. His research addresses robot manipulation, geometric algorithms for automation, and networked robots. More information and online projects are linked from www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg.

Host: Professor George Legrady, Media Arts & Technology