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Applications for realtime stereo exist anywhere
timely range data is useful. After several years of making SVS available
to the research community, there are many applications at various stages of
progress, from completed systems such as MIT's robotic wheelchair, to advanced
research on indoor environment modeling at SRI International. This page
has some sample applications and links to further information. If
you have an application you would like to share, please let us know!
Robotics
The STH-V2 is an ideal sensor for mobile robots, because
of its small size, low power, and ability to operate with just a single
framegrabber. The new MEGA-D sensor is also becoming popular on robotics
projects.
ActivMedia Robotics
The STH-V3 and MEGA-D are available on mobile robots from ActivMedia, fully
integrated on their P2 and PeopleBot robots.
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SRI International
AI Center's SenseNet Project
The SenseNet Project is part of DARPA's Tactical Mobile Robotics
initiative. SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center is
developing a team of mobile robots to cooperatively map indoor areas.
The STH-V1 is mounted on the top front of the robot. It's being used to
avoid obstacles, to map and model the environment, and to detect and
track people.
There are a lot of other sensors on the robot, too -- check out the
SenseNet web pages.
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| MIT
AI Center: the Wheelesley Project
Holly Yanco's robotics thesis is about assistive wheelchairs with
semi-autonomy.
The picture shows Wheelesley, a robot wheelchair project she
started at Wellesley College, and then carried over as her thesis work
at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Center. Wheelesley uses an STH-V1
stereo head, coupled to an onboard computer running SVS, to detect
obstacles in realtime. |
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| CMU
Robotics Institute: SunSync Project and the Hyperion Robot
Under a NASA grant, CMU is prototyping a sun-synchronous vehicle for
planetary exploration. Name Hyperion, this robot will
continuously travel at an appropriate latitude to stay in the sunlight,
supplying continous power.
The SVS was chose to operate a stereo system on the robot, because of
its outstanding processing efficiency and stereo performance. A
tech report describing the use of SVS for terrain mapping can be found here. |
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People Tracking
One of the most natural areas to use stereo is in
detecting and tracking people and their parts. Typical applications include
head tracking and pose estimation for video conferencing, limb tracking for
gesture recognition, and body tracking to analyze gate and actions.
University of
Maryland Computational Vision Center
This is another people-tracking project that was part of DARPA's VSAM effort.
The W4S system reliably tracks people and identifies the head, torso, and
limbs. W4S uses stereo from the STH-V2 head to augment its basic motion
detection algorithm.
University of Illinois Beckman
Institute and ECE Department / Microsoft Research
This joint research project tracks articulated 3D objects (e.g., humans) using
the STH-V2 and SRI's Small Vision System to acquire realtime range data. Check
out the MPEG movies of articulated arm/head/torso tracking!
Space Applications
As spacecraft become more automated, they need expanded
sensor capabilities to perform their tasks. Stereo analysis is a natural
sensor, because potentially it can provide detailed range data, at high data
rates, with very little power.
NASA AMES: Personal Satellite
Assistant
The PSA is envisioned as a device about the size of a softball,
with advanced sensors and actuators that enable it to maneuver in the
zero gravity of a space station or other space structure. Its ultimate
task is to detect and fix problems with space structures.
The STH-V2 and SRI's Small Vision System were used on the first
working prototype, to perform station-keeping tasks. The next
version is being designed with the MEGA-D sensor for increased
performance.
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