Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My research has 3 major thrusts in a lab of 14 people (10/2008): visual attention, mobile robotics, and computer vision. The overall objectives are two: 1. To further understanding of visual attention in humans and show how that understanding leads to better machine vision systems, and, 2. To develop the technology needed to help people with mobility impairments. For the first objective, there is the promise that a better understanding of human visual attention may lead to better understanding of visual and attentional mechanisms and thus, the failures that lead to serious problems such as neglect or degraded visual performance in the elderly or stroke victims. There is also the promise of more robust computer vision systems that may truly match performance of human vision in real world tasks. For the second objective, we hope to contribute to the solution of how to best allow people to age gracefully, in their homes or institutions, with mobility assistance and proper monitoring. To this end, the bulk of our work focuses on the development of an autonomous, intelligent, visually guided and visually monitored, wheelchair and robotic manipulator.