CCNY Grove School of Engineering Distinguished Lecture

& CCNY PRISM Lecture on Computer Vision, Robotics and Human-Computer Interaction


Title:  Autonomous Robots: Past, Present and Future

Takeo Kanade
Robotics Institute
U. A. and Helen Whitaker Professor
Carnegie Mellon University

Date: March 27, 2007
Time: 5:30 pm
Location: TBD

Abstract

Robots are information-driven systems that can see, think, and act.  Application areas of today’s robotics systems are expanding from traditional factory floors to more complex outdoor and daily environments.  I will describe several systems that I was involved in developing: autonomous driving car, robot helicopter and UAV, EyeVision for Super Bowl broadcast, medical robots, and humanoid robot.  As glamorous as they sound, the development of such systems requires the integration of many interdisciplinary expertise and technologies. Sprinkled with tales of the fun in developing such robots, this talk will provide a perspective of past and present technologies as well as speculations for future robots, including much closer relationship between human and robots for which we must study and model human functions.

Biographic Sketch

Takeo Kanade is currently the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and also the Director of Digital Human Research Center that he founded in Tokyo Japan. He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. He was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001.
 
Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, sensors, multi-media, autonomous ground and air mobile robots, and medical robotics. He has written more than 300 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 20 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.

Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, a Founding Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the former and founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision.  He has received several awards, including the NEC Computer and Communication Award, the Joseph Engelberger Award, the FIT Funai Accomplishment Award, the Allen Newell Research Excellence Award, the JARA Award, the Marr Prize Award, and Longuete-Higgins Prize.. 


The PRISM lecture series is supported by CCNY Grove School of Engineering, and National Science Foundation.