Gimli: Robot with a Vision

Posted 28 Oct 2004 at 21:05 UTC by steve

Roland Piquepaille writes, "Robotic speech recognition has made huge advances in recent years, allowing for easy voice interaction with robots. But robotic vision processing is still very rudimentary. Some robots "see," but they need powerful computers and are not very mobile. A team of researchers at the University of Arizona wants to change all this by mixing biology and electronics to create robotic vision. The team has designed a visual navigation system by mimicking insect vision and demonstrated the concept by building a robot named Gimli. Instead of using standard microprocessors, the team devised electronic vision circuits based on a bunch of slower analog processors working in parallel." Charles Higgins and other researchers at the Higgins Lab are working on the Neuromorphic Vision project of which Gimli is a part. For more on Gimli, see Roland Piquepaille's blog. Also see our previous stories on the University of Arizona octopus tracking robot sub and their MAV robots.