Title: Towards a Visually-Guided Semi-Autonomous Wheelchair for the Disabled
Abstract:
An intelligent, autonomous wheelchair for the disabled has been the dream of many for some time.
Yet, the dream seems to still be very distant. In part, the role and utility of vision seems to not have
reached its full potential in this application. I will describe a long-standing project we affectionately call
Playbot whose goal is to develop a purely visually-guided wheelchair with manipulator that would assist
a child. Most of the functionality easily translates to assistance for a broader population. I will present an
overview of the project with a focus on several vision-based components including active visual object
search, mapping, and doorway behavior. Video will demonstrate many of these functions. There is
much to do particularly in integration and a preview of a control architecture for this purpose will be given.
As a general goal, we seek to understand the role of vision, as a primary sense, in autonomous assistive agents.
This project, framed against this ambitious goal, hopes to make a few small steps towards the dream.
Biography:
John K. Tsotsos received an honours undergraduate degree in Engineering Science in 1974 from the University of Toronto and continued at the University of Toronto to complete a Master's degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1980 both in Computer Science. He was on the faculty in Computer Science and in Medicine at the University of Toronto from 1980 - 1999, where he founded and led the Computer Vision Research Group. In 2000 he moved to York University in Toronto where he is currently Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering. He was Director of York's Centre for Vision Research, 2000 - 2006. He holds the NSERC Tier I Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision and is an Adjunct Professor in both the departments of Ophthalmology and of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He was a Fellow in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1985 - 95, has several conference papers that received recognition, was awarded the 2006 Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society Award for Research Excellence and Service, and is part of the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program for 2007-08.
