Colloquia

Advancing Mobile Robots to 3D

Jizhong Xiao
City University of New York (CUNY)

Wednesday, January 30th
Sage 3510 - 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.

Abstract:

Most of the mobile robots used in urban applications nowadays essentially move in 2D planes without wall-climbing capability. The robotics team at the City College of New York (CCNY) has developed several generations of mobile wall-climbing robots, named as City-Climber, which are able to move on various smooth or rough surfaces and can carry a relatively large payload. Unlike the conventional ground mobile robots operating in 2D space, and UAVs in 3D space, the City-Climber robots essentially operate in constrained 3D space, i.e., its action space is confined within planar surfaces while the sensing space is 3D, facilitated by the freedom of motion on ground, walls, and ceilings. This attribution makes planning and control a very difficult and important problem in many canonical tasks (e.g., surveillance coverage, multi-robot formation control, target tracking) employing wall-climbing robots. This talk will present the recent progress in our research effort to advance mobile robots to 3D, including: development of novel wall-climbing robots, system-on-programmable-chip (SoPC) solution to on-board processing for ultra-small robots, and localization and coordination of a heterogeneous multi-robot team (3 ground robots and a wall-climbing robot) deployed in constrained 3D space of urban environments.

Bio:

Jizhong Xiao received his Ph.D. degree from Michigan State University in 2002; Master of Engineering degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and MS, BS degrees from East China Institute of Technology in 1999, 1993, and 1990, respectively. He joined the EE Dept. of the City College of New York (CCNY) in 2002 and currently is an associate professor and a doctoral faculty member of Ph.D. programs in Engineering and Computer Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Dr. Xiao started the robotics research program at City College and is the founding director of CCNY Robotics Lab (website: http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu ) and the Center for Perceptual Robotics, Intelligent Sensors and Machines (PRISM Center). His research interests include robotics and control, embedded system design, digital signal processing, and intelligent systems. He is a recipient of National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2007. Dr. Xiao has served the robotics community in various roles of many robotics conferences, and served as guest editor and reviewer for major robotics journals and conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of Sigma Xi, and New York Academy of Sciences.

Hosted by: Volkan Isler (x-3275) and John Wen (x-6156)

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Last updated: January 10, 2008