Research

I am currently part of the Tracker research group here at UNC. The goings on of the Tracker group can be followed here (when it's updated...).

The specific projects I've worked on are:

WHISPER (my thesis/dissertation topic)
Inertially-Assisted Smart Optical Sensors (what I thought was going to be my thesis topic)
Video projectors (with the STC group)
Black Widow (the robot I used for my senior thesis as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University)

WHISPER

Whisper is a tracking system I have built in order to test some ideas about human-motion tracking devices that use sound. This section has its own page since I've been working on it for so long...

Inertially-Assisted Smart Optical Sensors

My personal interest was in VLSI optical smart sensors. These are chips that have optical sensors on them as well as some computational circuitry to do simple processing on the images after they are captured. There seems to be quite a lot of research going on in this area - especially about "silicon retinas". Here are a few references on the topic:

Vision Chips - a good overview of vision sensors
Caltech's Koch Laboratory
Just some random VLSI papers

My advisor (Gary Bishop) developed an optical smart sensor in the early 80s (Self-Tracker) with the goal of tracking human motion. I was researching the idea of combining similar optical sensors with inertial sensors to create an improved tracking device.

Video Projectors for Imperceptible Structured Light

In the fall of 1997 (my first semester at UNC) I worked with the STC group. I reverse-engineered and modified a digital micromirror projector to allow it to project imperceptible structured light. This is (or at least was...) being used in the Office of the Future to allow video projectors to serve double-duty as display devices and depth extraction devices.

Black Widow

For my senior thesis as an undergraduate I worked with the idea of using a robot's mechanism to train a neural network to control part of the robot. Most techniques out there use either a simulation or a human to provide training data for the neural network learning algorithm.

I still have the robot in my apartment, but it is currently lacking a brain. I didn't own the microcontroller or the accelerometers that Black Widow used to control itself and determine when it's body was level. I originally built this robot as a joint project with Ryan Miller, a guy who recently got his Ph.D. from the CMU Robotics Institute. It turned out to be a convenient platform to build my senior thesis around.

Here is the paper I wrote on this work [PDF].