Lynn Conway

Teleautonomous systems: projecting and coordinating intelligent action at a distance

The authors have coined the term teleautonomous to describe methods for producing intelligent action at a distance. Teleautomation goes beyond autonomous control in that it blends in human intelligence and action as appropriate. It goes beyond teleoperation in that it incorporates as much autonomy as is possible or reasonable. A novel approach for solving one of the fundamental problems facing teleautonomous systems is discussed in detail: the need to overcome time delays due to telemetry and signal propagation. Concepts called time and position clutches are introduced; these allow the time and position frames, respectively, between the local user control and the remote device being controlled to be desynchronized. The design and implementation of these mechanisms lead to substantial telemanipulation performance improvements, including the novel result of improvements even in the absence of time delays. The controls also yield a simple protocol for handoffs of the control of manipulation tasks between local operators and remote systems. >

Dynamical system representation, generation, and recognition of basic oscillatory motion gestures

We present a system for generation and recognition of oscillatory gestures. Inspired by gestures used in two representative human-to-human control areas, we consider a set of oscillatory motions and refine from them a 24 gesture lexicon. Each gesture is modeled as a dynamical system with added geometric constraints to allow for real time gesture recognition using a small amount of processing time and memory. The gestures are used to control a pan-tilt camera neck. We propose extensions for use in areas such as mobile robot control and telerobotics.

Video mirroring and iconic gestures: enhancing basic videophones to provide visual coaching and visual control

In this paper we present concepts and architectures for mirroring and gesturing into remote sites when video conferencing. Mirroring enables those at one site to visually coach those at a second site by pointing at locally referenceable objects in the scene reflected back to the second site. Thus mirroring provides a way to train people at remote sites in practical tasks such as operating equipment and assembling or fixing things. We also discuss how video mirroring can be extended to enable visual control of remote mechanisms, even when using basic videophones, by using a visual interpreter at the remote site to process transmitted visual cues and derive intended control actions in the remote scene.

Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution: How a Series of Failures Triggered a Paradigm Shift in Digital Design

Innovations in science and engineering have excited me for a lifetime, as they have for many friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, our wider culture often imagines the engineering life to be one of tedium and technical drudgery, seldom witnessing the joys of such creativity.

It/cs workshop: multimodal, multimedia courseware for teaching technical concepts in humanistic context

As global competition in IT increases, IT/CS students must learn concepts, theory, and implementation more efficiently, more broadly (e.g., technical and humanistic context) and in greater technical depth. IT (esp. CS and mathematics) is data-intensive - teaching can suffer from information overload, particularly in Web-based courseware. Efforts to simplify IT/CS teaching sometimes result in technology overload, where students encounter technical detail without humanistic context (e.g., history, ethics, business aspects). Overload usually correlates with decreased comprehension, increased boredom, decreased learning, and potentially lower performance in applicative tasks. In response to this problem, our paper describes IT/CS Workshop (ICW), an innovative, interactive Web-based paradigm for teaching and learning of technical concepts in a multi-level, multi-media humanistic context. ICW, under development at University of Florida, complements established undergraduate and graduate coursework and texts, by interactively presenting concepts at three modes or levels of abstraction: (1) WorkShop - Students are assigned tasks similar to jobs in an industrial workshop, with interactive suggestions and helps; (2) WorkBench - Technical views of Tools (e.g., concept, theory, example) and Techniques (implementation and analysis) are integrated with humanistic views of Environment (history and recycling of previous technology) and Society (ethics, interactive collaboration with experts and friends); and (3) TestBench - Interactive analysis of results, quizzes, practice exams, and progress tracking help students evaluate their work, with pointers to remedial web pages. For example, ICWs multi-media (audio-video lectures, animated examples, and sophisticated interactive analysis programs) support teaching of computer systems performance analysis (IT), algorithm complexity analysis (CS), and error propagation theory (Mathematics). Links to related Internet groups, websites, and scholarly articles support in-depth learning. ICWs multi-level, multi-media approach enriches teaching and learning, while reinforcing different learning styles and cultural views. Additional features of ICW include creative exploration, whereby students can collaborate competitively, within loose constraints. This opens many new applications and approaches, and provides multiple data sources to support the semi-automatic or (eventually) automatic monitoring and modification of student learning behavior. Thus, instructors could extract metaphors for exploration, then apply these to the process of evaluating student progress. This paper describes ICWs software architecture, interfaces, and courseware generation techniques, with examples from IT (hardware performance) and CS (complexity analysis).

Teleoperated mobile robotics instructional laboratory

Teaching students concepts about mobile and stationary robotics is difficult because there are few environments available for elegant and robust demonstrations. To aid students understanding, robotic concepts need to be demonstrated not only in the lab but in the classroom. Since it is usually difficult to bring the equipment from the lab to the classroom, an environment for controlling and viewing the robots from the classroom is presented. The environment has several features: control from a distance, visually monitoring of actions, and feedback from different levels of system. A complete environment incorporating these features for teleoperated control of mobile robots and robot arms is detailed.

Incorporating robot vision in teleautonomous systems

A new method is proposed to tele-control the movement of a remote robot when the movement involves contact with objects and when the control involves a significant time delay. In this method, a vision system is incorporated into the tele-autonomous systems. The vision system is used to do vision sensory information feedback to update the local world model and to implement a relative move mode to control the remote robot. This method will effectively overcome some of the limitations of current tele-robot control systems.