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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006
April 13, 12:00 p.m., Berger Auditorium, Skirkanich Hall (210 S. 33rd Street)
Darius Burschka
Technical University Munich
"Hierarchical Visual Perception for Minimally Invasive Surgery, Humanoids, and UAVs"
Abstract:
Context-awareness and instinctive response to visual stimuli in the
environment are the new challenges for joint action of humans with
technical systems. I will present how we use the sensor information
from monocular, binocular and lidar systems to control technical
systems in a wide range of applications. The areas of research
include medical robots for minimally invasive surgery, humanoids, and
mobile/flying systems. The sensor data is processed at different levels
of abstraction allowing implementations on systems with strongly
varying processing power and cycle time requirements ranging from a few
hundreds of microseconds to hundreds of milliseconds. This allows
to provide the necessary information at different levels of control
from basic stabilization tasks that are necessary for flying systems,
like blimps and quadrucopters, to advanced planning and localization
systems that operate at a slower rate but require context knowledge
and/or global information.
I will give an overview of my work at the Technical University Munich with
a joint appointment at the Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics of the
German Aerospace Agency (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen. My research involves
endoscopic navigation for minimally invasive surgery on N-from-M
manipulator systems, exploration tasks for humanoids and manipulator
systems, navigation tasks on autonomous cars using a combination of a
parallel lidar system with multi-focal cameras, and navigation and control
of indoor and outdoor flying systems. The flying systems are used for
vision-based 3D reconstruction tasks of historical sites like, e.g., the
Castle Neuschwanstein.
Biography: Darius
Burschka received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in
the field of binocular exploration of indoor environments with mobile
robots in 1998. After his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher
at the Yale University on Vision-Based Control for mobile
systems. In 1999, he moved as Associate Research Scientist to the
Computer Science Department at the Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, where he extended his research interest to Human Computer
Interaction (HCI), and medical navigation and registration. He
became Assistant Research Professor at the Johns Hopkins University in
2003. In 2005, he moved as Associate Professor to the Department of
Computer Science at the Technical University in Munich, where he
created a virtual institute for Telepresence and Data-fusion in
collaboration with the Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics of the
German Aerospace Agency (DLR). He is a member of the Executive Board of
the newly established Cluster of Excellence in the field of Cognitive
Technical Systems, where he coordinates the perception area. His
principle areas of research are sensors for mobile systems and Human
Computer Interfaces. The focus of his research is on vision-based
navigation and three-dimensional reconstruction from sensor data.
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