Soatto, Stefano Washington University $51,710.00
CAREER: Controllable Visual Cues: Analysis and Applications of Images as Sensory Signals in Complex Control Systems
This is the first year funding of a four-year continuing award. This project is concerned with the study of vision as a sensor for engineering systems operating in complex, dynamic and unknown environments. It entails the analysis of measurable properties of images that depend upon controllable parameters such as the geometry and optics of the imaging device. These properties are called "controllable cues" and they include, for instance, stereo, motion and accommodation. In the project, the purposeful aspect of vision is emphasized: knowledge and representation of the environment are only functional to the accomplishment of control tasks, as for instance visual-based navigation, docking, manipulation, endoscopic surgery, Human-Machine Interaction. In order to address the issue of modeling and representation, it is necessary to understand how the geometry and the dynamics of the environment are related to the information coming from the imaging sensor. In the long term, these issues will become crucial in the study of complex systems, where low-level information needs to be organized in order to perform effective communication between different levels of a control hierarchy, or between different agents involved in the control structure. The research material will be integrated into an educational plan that spans graduate, undegraduate and pre-college levels. In addition, to emphasize physical intuition, the PI plan to develop an experimental setup on the use of controllable cues, which will be accessible by precollege students through an Internet educational service.
