Technological Research Issues

A wide spectrum of technological research issues are being studied in the project ranging from vision sensors to cooperative distributed problem solving. They can be classified into the following five major topics:

1. Design and Development of Hardware/Software Platform
2. Versatile Vision Sensors
3. Real Time Object Motion Understanding by Cooperative Observation Stations
4. Versatile Image Generation by Cooperative Observation Stations
5. Learning Cooperative Behaviors for Vision-Based Mobile Robots

In this section, we describe our approaches to these issues and demonstrate preliminary results so far obtained.

• Hardware and Network Organization of a Prototype CDV System
• Versatile Vision Sensors
  • Multi Focus Camera
  • Appearance Sphere Camera
• Real Time Object Motion Understanding by Cooperative Observation Stations
  • Single Object Detection and Tracking by a Single Observation Station
  • Cooperative Tracking of a Single Object by Multiple Observation Stations
  • Communication Bases between Multiple Observation Stations
  • Multiple Object Detection and Tracking by Cooperative Dynamic Task Sharing
  • Wide Area Object Tracking by Multiple Observation Stations without Common Visual Fields
• Versatile Image Generation by Cooperative Observation Stations
• Learning Cooperative Behaviors for Vision-Based Mobile Robots