Mike Daily

Pheromone Robotics

We describe techniques for coordinating the actions of large numbers of small-scale robots to achieve useful large-scale results in surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, and path finding. We exploit the biologically inspired notion of a “virtual pheromone,” implemented using simple transceivers mounted atop each robot. Unlike the chemical markers used by insect colonies for communication and coordination, our virtual pheromones are symbolic messages tied to the robots themselves rather than to fixed locations in the environment. This enables our robot collective to become a distributed computing mesh embedded within the environment, while simultaneously acting as a physical embodiment of the user interface. This leads to notions of world-embedded computation and world-embedded displays that provide different ways to think about robot colonies and the types of distributed computations that such colonies might perform.

World embedded interfaces for human-robot interaction

Human interaction with large numbers of robots or distributed sensors presents a number of difficult challenges including supervisory management, monitoring of individual and collective state, and apprehending situation awareness. A rich source of information about the environment can be provided even with robots that have no explicit representations or maps of their locale. To do this, we transform a robot swarm into a distributed interface embedded within the environment. Visually, each robot acts like a pixel within a much larger visual display space so that any robot need only communicate a small amount of information from its current location. Our approach uses augmented reality techniques for communicating information to humans from large numbers of small-scale robots to enable situation awareness, monitoring, and control for surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, and path finding.

Distributed design review in virtual environments

In large distributed corporations, distributed design review offers the potential for cost savings, reduced time to market, and improved efficiency. It also has the potential to improve the design process by enabling wider expertise to be incorporated in design reviews. This paper describes the integration of several components to enable distributed virtual design review in mixed multi-party, heterogeneous multi-site 2D and immersive 3D environments. The system provides higher layers of support for collaboration including avatars, high fidelity audio, and shared artifact manipulation. The system functions across several interface environments ranging from CAVEs to Walls to desktop workstations. At the center of the software architecture is the Human Integrating Virtual Environment (HIVE) [6], a collaboration infrastructure and toolset to support research and development of multi-user, geographically distributed, 2D and 3D shared applications. The HIVE functions with VisualEyes software for visualizing 3D data in virtual environments. We also describe in detail the configuration and lessons learned in a two site, heterogeneous multi-user demonstration of the system between HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California and GM R&D in Warren, Michigan.

A review of time critical decision making models and human cognitive processes

From a general cognitive perspective, decision making is the process of selecting a choice or course of action from a set of alternatives. A large number of time critical decision making models have been developed over the course of several decades. This paper reviews both the underlying cognitive processes and several decision making models. In the first section, we briefly describe the primary underlying cognitive processes and issues that are common to most, if not all, decision making models, with a focus on attention, working memory, and reasoning. The second section reviews several of the most prominent high-level models of decision making, especially those developed for military contexts

Dynamic collaborator discovery in information intensive environments

As organizations continue to grow more complex, people have increasing difficulty remaining aware of others whose work could impact their own. Despite the rapid proliferation of our communication networks, we often hear the complaint “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.” This is a particularly important issue within large organizations and could be reduced if people could more easily discover potential collaborators. As organizations continuously re-organize, it is often the case that one person comes to be working on a problem that someone else has already solved. Likewise, a particular customer need might be more readily satisfied with the efficient identification of the appropriate individuals to assemble into a team. Coordination between people with common interests is a particularly important issue within the military intelligence community. While focusing on a specific region or political arena, for example, the significance of a certain subtle detail may not be apparent to an analyst until it can be placed in a “big picture” view that spans multiple regional and political arenas. The analyst who can find the right people to contact to help assemble this larger view is most likely to succeed. The goal of “collaborator discovery” is to help people with similar interests find each other with minimal effort.

Advanced Human-computer Interfaces for Air Traffic Management and Simulation

New technologies will significantly change Air Traffic Control over the next 15 years. These changes will require improved human-computer interfaces for the less regulated, more complex future environment. This paper describes a highly interactive, real time demonstration of 3-D visualization and interface concepts for the air traffic domain, including Free Flight. This demonstration offers a 3-D, stereoscopic view from both the controllers and pilots perspectives, featuring representations of projected flight paths, 3-D graphical and audio proximity warnings, and 3-D text labels that automatically reorient themselves. Feedback from domain experts is described. In Free Flight, pilots and airlines will set their own courses and resolve conflicts autonomously when possible. This demonstration also shows visualizations of the Protected Airspace Zone and Tactical Alert Zone safety regions around Free Flight aircraft, which are most easily understood through the use of 3-D graphics. Future versions of this demonstration will acquire more realistic data, improve the interaction techniques and integrate the visualization more closely with conflict detection and resolution algorithms.

Performance analysis of an outdoor augmented reality tracking system that relies upon a few mobile beacons

We describe and evaluate a new tracking concept for outdoor Augmented Reality. A few mobile beacons added to the environment correct errors in head-worn inertial and GPS sensors. We evaluate the accuracy through detailed simulation of many error sources. The most important parameters are the errors in measuring the beacon and users head positions, and the geometric configuration of the beacons around the point to augment. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we identify combinations of beacon configurations and error parameters that meet a specified goal of 1 m net error at 100 m range.

Eye gaze correction for videoconferencing

This paper describes a 2D videoconferencing system with eye gaze correction. Tracking the eyes and warping the eyes appropriately each frame appears to create natural eye contact between users. The geometry of the eyes as well as the displacement of the camera with the remote users image determines the warp. We implement this system within software, not requiring any specialized hardware.

Self-Driving Cars

Many recent technological advances have helped to pave the way forward for fully autonomous vehicles. This special issue explores three aspects of the self-driving car revolution: a historical perspective with a focus on perception for autonomous vehicles, how government policy will impact self-driving cars technically and commercially, and how cloud-based infrastructure plays a role in the future.

WebOn World: Geo-coded Video and Spatial Audio in Vehicles

Existing driver-vehicle interfaces do not support communication of geo-spatial relationships within the environment for navigation or information interaction. Instead, they rely on distracting maps, overabundant text, and often confusing audio. Acquiring and maintaining situation awareness in a moving vehicle in a 3D environment requires more natural spatial cues. A rich source of directional information can be provided via three-dimensional geo-coded visual and auditory cues. This paper describes an in-vehicle system called WebOnWorld for the use of geo-coded visual and auditory information, with special emphasis on the system implementation of the first in-vehicle geo-coded multi-channel, spatial audio. Supplied with a geographically coded audio/video database, WebOnWorld renders spoken information, guidance, and situation awareness for infotainment, navigation, and vehicle/driver safety to the driver, enabling improved situation awareness. We describe video-based cueing, audio-based cueing, use of the video and audio databases as a user accessible whiteboard, and driver and system performance issues.