Sting Racing is the GT entry into the DARPA Grand Challenge competition to take place on November 3, 2007. For RIM@GT it is part of a longer term effort into intelligent vehicle technology. Situation awareness, increased safety, and smart transportation poses interesting challenges to our society. Dr. Christensen serves as the principal investigator for the project.
Research Projects
Cognitive Robotics
This project study methods to deploy of mobile manipulation systems for assistance to people in everyday situations. Scenarios include both workplace applications and domestic use of systems. A particular domain is assistance to elderly and handicapped. Cognitive robotics involves design of systems that uses sensory perception for situation awareness, interactive acquisition of skills and tasks, and interpretation of actions in the environment.
Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants
Dr. Christensen serves as the project coordinator for the EU CoSy project which runs 2005-2008. Further details are available at the project web facility.
Mobile Manipulation
Mobile robotics is by now a fairly mature problem for structured and engineered environments. However, interacting with the environment has so far only been studied in limited and fairly simple scenarios. The present research effort uses a manipulation system mounted on top of a Segway RMP for doing studies on mobile manipulation including use of force, visual and laser based feedback. The problem includes recognition, sensor based servoing, platform-actuator integration, navigation and safe operation in the presence of humans.
Photographs by Gary Meek
