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Tuesday, October 20, 2009
MAE - Skynet gets new 3 year NSF Grant to improve AI
MAE's DARPA/SKYNET Project has been selected to receive a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation under NSF's Cyber-Physical Systems. Mark Campbell, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering is the principal investigator. Hadas Kress-Gazit, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Daniel Huttenlocher, the John P. and Rilla Neafsey Professor of Computing, Information Science and Business and dean of computing and information science, are co-principal investigators for the project.
"We'll be looking at the next level of intelligence in the vehicle," said Mark Campbell, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "In the near term there will be elements of the research that can be integrated into safety systems in human-operated vehicles," Campbell added, noting that while robots are not as intelligent as humans, they can react far more swiftly. Such systems could warn of collisions or take evasive action, recognize if a driver is impaired or asleep, and assist handicapped drivers.
But autonomous vehicles still aren't smart enough, Campbell said. The DARPA challenge was run on a closed, controlled course. "They didn't have pedestrians or people on bicycles," Campbell pointed out. "Our car could not drive autonomously through Collegetown right now." The present car uses sensor data from radar, lidar and video cameras to build a "model" of its environment -- something human drivers also do, Campbell pointed out -- but the model is still quite simple. It's designed to avoid collisions, but it still can make mistakes, such as failing to distinguish between another car and a cement barrier -- a mistake Skynet made in the DARPA challenge. To intelligently drive through a place like Collegetown, the environmental model must be created in real time, Campbell said, and distinguish between small cars and big trucks, not to mention pedestrians and even pedestrians towing rolling suitcases.
Adapted from Cornell Chronicle story by Bill Steele
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