Thursday, August 21, 2008

Weighing the evidence

An “evidence grid” sounds like something you’d encounter in one of the Matrix movies, although it’s more likely to be incorporated into a Terminator, should they ever be built. You see, an “evidence grid” is a 3D model of a scene, portrayed in voxels, that allows robots to deal with ‘environmental uncertainty’.

I’m talking here about vision guided robotics, (VGR,) as implemented by
Seegrid Corporation. They go beyond conventional VGR, (by which I mean the kind of system where machine vision is used to guide a fixed robot arm,) by building a range of autonomous, vision guided robots that can wander the floors of your factory, warehouse, hospital or office building.

You need to check out this ‘
how it works’ link to see just what they’re doing. Suffice to say it’s essentially stereo vision combined with some very sophisticated image processing.

There are some cool little movies on the website. It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

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