I am working with various graduate students on a project called MinDART which stands for Minnesota Distributed Autonomous Robotics Team. This group has been working for a while dealing with LEGO robots. The group is dealing with visual localization, homing, and implicit communication between robots.

The tasks of the robots is to forage for "shrooms", which are little beacons that emit infrared light. The robots are able to search for the targets with infrared detectors. The key issue that we are dealing with is homing. Once the robots find the shrooms, they need to be able to affectively find their way back home. Last summer, work was done that accomplished this task using light sensors and light towers. The robots used visual localization to find their way home.

This summer, what I am going to be working on, is replacing the simple light sensors with cameras called the CMUcam. This camera will allow us to use colored towers, and use visual localization based on the colors as opposed to simply light. We are going to be working on getting this working. In addition, we will be working on implicit communication between the robots. This can be done by having lights on the robots which are activated for various reasons, so that other robots can read the color of the light and learn information.