Monocular SLAM Supported Object Recognition Pillai & Leonard - 2015 Yesterday we looked at the SLAM problem. Once we've made a map and identified some landmarks, a next obvious challenge is to figure out what those landmarks actually are. This is the object recognition problem. I've chosen today's paper because it's recent (2015) and contains ... Continue Reading

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Part I History of the SLAM problem - Durrant-Whyte & Bailey 2006 You can't read far in robotics without encountering the SLAM problem. But what is it exactly? And what are the main approaches to solving it? Today's paper provides an overview of the SLAM problem, a short history of research ... Continue Reading

A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot - Brooks 1985 With over 9,000 citations, "A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot" seems to be to the world of robotics as "On the Criteria to be used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" is to general software engineering. We're back in 1985, programming ... Continue Reading

Human-Robot Teaming for Rescue Missions: Team ViGIR's Approach to the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials - Kohlbrecher et al. 2014 Yesterday we looked at ROS, the Robot Operating System. Today I thought it would be fun to see an example of ROS in action, and where better to find that than in a DARPA Robotics ... Continue Reading

ROS: An open-source Robot Operating System - Quigely et al. 2009 Distributed systems are everywhere. Caitie McAffrey for example does a wonderful job of bridging the distributed systems and gaming communities. But I haven't seen as much cross-pollination between the distributed system and robotics communities. And that's a shame because robotics is a really interesting ... Continue Reading