I was sitting here tonight doing some reading (catching up on a number
of message boards and RSS feeds) I turned on the TV. I have a Dish Network satellite system, and really like the fact that there are some very cool educational channels.
Tonight I turned to channel 9404 which is UWTV from the University of Washington. This particular channel has some of the best computer science ‘colloquiums‘ that I have seen. Oh yeah … and that is the word they use to name this series of programs on their own web site. This is a really cool program. It’s all about Robotic Reasoning, and the learning being down by creating robots that play Hide and Seek.
What is even more impressive is that the entire series appears to be
viewable on-line! I’m going to go and take a look at the other shows they have! This program really looks interesting … Location Enhanced Web Services … oh man … I’m going to watch this one on ZebraNet for sure
Anyhow … it is amazing to see the animations they have created that
show the belief models that are created by the robot as it navigates
through a room looking for an
“evader”. These are extremely powerful robots able to travel at
over 2 meters per second, with impressive acceleration. The have
some sort of a scanning laser rangefinder for ‘vision’, and have
powerful computers on them. They have a programmed ‘evader’
robot, and then one or more ‘seeking’ robots that all cruise around
some building – the evader evading and the seekers seeking.
The level of mathmatics that are being used is what I really
enjoy. The robot is creating a real-time belief model that
contains probability values for all parts of the building as it cruises
around looking. The models even show where previously searched
areas will show signs of slight increased probability of an evader
being present after the seeker has left the area. Very cool …
The speaker – Geoffrey Gordon from CMU – then reviewed the range of
algorythms they used to produce the results, and also to demonstrate
the learning and compression capabilities. Overall … this was
well worth watching. He is doing some very impressive work …