VASC Seminar Announcement
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Speaker: Parag Batavia
Affiliation:  Carnegie Mellon University, NREC
E-mail:  parag@ri.cmu.edu
Date: Monday, October 21
Time: 3:30pm
Place: NSH 1507

Title: Autonomous Coverage Operations in Semi-Structured Terrain (Or, how I turned my Ph.D. into a successful career cutting grass)

Abstract: In this talk, I will present the results of a three year program, done in conjunction with The Toro Corp., on automation of turf-management equipment. We have concentrated on lawn-mowing applications, in large, semi-structured environments, such as golf courses, sports fields, and city parks. The terrains that we operate in are assumed to be locally smooth, but can have significant hills and valleys. The terrain is also assumed to be sparsely populated with obstacles, although when present, they can be quite small (6" or less). The main challenges in this work are:
 - High precision localization (cm-level) over large areas
 - Highly robust obstacle detection (of small  obstacles) in various lighting and non-ideal
   weather conditions
 - Component cost must be kept low
 - MTBF must be high
I will present where we are with regards to these issues, and what still needs to be done.