The support provided by this award will assist the Rochester researchers to pursue the goal of real-time active vision. Based on their experience with parallel vision algorithms on both general and special purpose hardware, they will move to the next stage: integration of parallel solutions to individual problems into a unified solution to a single complex problem. To facilitate this research the award will help them develop a parallel laboratory for real-time vision consisting of four key components: a "head," containing cameras for visual input, a robot arm or "neck" that supports and moves the "head," a special purpose parallel processor for high-bandwidth, low-level vision processing, and a general purpose parallel processor for high-level vision and planning. New research directions that will be investigated using the laboratory include heterogeneous parallelism, hierarchical adaptive control for sensory-motor systems, cooperation of symbolic planning with real-world action, operating systems for sealable MIMD architectures, and parallel programming environments. The laboratory will also serve to unify research in massively parallel architectures, vision, planning, robotics, and parallel software systems.
