"Albert" Debuts in
March Madness for the Mind
Posted: April
14, 2006
Laura
Trutoiu '08 hopes that in her lifetime the world will
see voice-activated cars for use by physically or visually disabled
adults who are now unable to drive. The cars, she imagines, will
respond to commands such as, "Take me home." She is
collaborating with a Five College team of students on such a
project and recently traveled to the tenth annual March Madness
for the
Mind, a showcase for the nation’s top student inventors,
to demonstrate the team's work-in-progress, a robotic vehicle
named Albert.
Describing
March Madness for the Mind, Trutoiu said, "It's
impressive to see how well people with different backgrounds
and training can collaborate to come up with and implement these
amazing
ideas. It was definitely a worthwhile experience, and I have
only one regret: there were more sessions that I wanted to attend
than
there was available time."
The project
is the brainchild of Hampshire College student Ben Einstein,
who was inspired by the 2005 DARPA Grand
Challenge,
an annual race of self-driven vehicles across 132 miles of
difficult terrain in the Southwestern desert. While that
race is sponsored
by the U.S. Department of Defense to hasten the development
of robotics and autonomous vehicles for use in battle,
Einstein
observed
that DARPA technology could be applied to work being done at
the Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center at Hampshire
College.
The Lemelson Center develops technology to assist physically
and visually disabled people.
Einstein's
team will eventually produce a full-sized vehicle, officially
known as ERNEST (Electronic
Rationale and Navigation
Embedded Systems Technology). So far, the team has a smaller
prototype of ERNEST named Albert (for obvious reasons). Albert
is 25 inches
long, 14 inches wide, and weighs about 35 pounds. Mounted
on its front are its "eyes," two cameras that operate
in stereovision--the
way human eyes work--to focus on a single point simultaneously.
Albert differs from other autonomous vehicles now being developed
because it operates only on visual cues, not on other sensory
devices such as infrared or sonar. According to Einstein
and Trutoiu, it
is extremely difficult to program a computer to visually
discern important features in the landscape. Albert is now programmed
by a color cue to follow a path marked by a red ribbon.
Einstein
got started on the project last fall after speaking with Colin
Twitchell, director of the Lemelson Center, about
his interest
in creating an autonomous vehicle for his senior thesis,
or "Division-III" project.
Twitchell agreed to be his Div-III adviser and put him
in touch with several professors including MHC's
Claude Fennema, professor of computer science, who specializes
in
computer vision
technology. "He
was super interested," said Einstein. "He said
I should talk to Laura because she would be very interested
in working on
the project."
Trutoiu, a
computer science and mathematics major with a keen interest in
artificial intelligence,
said the project "perfectly
fit what I want to do. It involves a lot of thinking
outside the box.
It's not narrow like some computer science projects."
Einstein and Trutoiu have been working with two other
Mount Holyoke
students, Farahnaz Ahmed '06 and Susannah Larrabee '07,
and the four are taking a class this spring with Fennema
in computer vision
and robotics that is centered on the ERNEST project.
Trutoiu plans to do her senior thesis on issues relating
to computer
vision.
While in Portland,
Einstein and Trutoiu also showcased a related
project, an adaptive steering wheel for a vehicle that allows
the vehicle to be operated by a single finger. Einstein,
who qualified
for his pilot’s license while in high school, designed
the system based on the yoke of an airplane. The system would
enable
physically disabled people to drive and could be ready for
use in as little as five years.
Einstein and
Trutoiu got a lot of positive feedback at the conference and
returned
to Massachusetts ready to resume
their work. Albert’s
next task will be to follow a sidewalk, a far more complex
software challenge. Einstein and Trutoiu are grateful to
Fennema, Twitchell,
Hampshire College computer science professor Jaime Davila,
and others at Mount Holyoke and Hampshire who have supported
the project.
Related Links:
Lemelson
Assistive Technology Development Center
Ernest
Project Photo Gallery
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