This award will provide supplementary support to enable Dr. Matthew Barth of the University of California, Santa Barbara, to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Saburo Tsuji for ten months at Osaka University in Japan. They will apply Dr. Barth's Real-time Attentive Sensing (RAS) strategy for speeding up robotic sense-data processing to mobile robots. RAS is intended to overcome the common robotic problem in which the processing of sensory data is often slower than the speed with which the robot must accomplish its task. RAS first processes simple features rapidly and in parallel, all across the senory field. It then "zeroes in" to do detailed processing only on the features relevant to the task. The mobile robot capabilities developed in Dr. Tsuji's laboratory will complement Dr. Barth's experience with this processing technique and will facilitate the verification of the technique.
