Vision and Robotics Research, University of Rochester
The Vision and Robotics Research at the University of Rochester is designed to support research on anthropomorphic robotic systems, interaction between human and machine, and human performance. Here, researchers bothered by a wide array of topics and applications managed to unify all these projects and focus on techniques that require little or no calibration, and as a result makes them suitable to use in natural everyday environments.
This laboratory also focuses on the use of advanced vision and virtual reality techniques in psychophysics experiments in order to study the human brain and man’s visual system. In one of their projects, researchers headed by Mary Hayhoe and Dana Ballard studied human visual attention and short term memory in a virtual world where objects are made to appear and disappear, change its color in real time manipulated by the gaze direction of the human subject.
Some of the projects that the Vision and Robotics Research have done in the past includes Calibration-free robotics utilizing intelligent sensing, Augmenting and synthesizing images and movies, Recognizing objects, faces, and activities without geometric models, Visual navigation and mobile robots, Computer vision algorithms, and Virtual Reality Applications, among others.
A vital feature of this laboratory is its capability to utilize a multiprocessor as its central computing resource and at the same its host. These are so fast and efficient that they can compete with the performance of special purpose frame rate pipelines. The multiprocessor can also allow real asynchronous parallelism that is vital for simultaneous and cooperating motor control and visual sensing.
The Vision and Robotics Research in the University of Rochester was also a recipient of NASA’s “Cool Robot of the Week” award.
