M. Bernardine Dias

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Robotics Institute

The necessary transformation of engineering education is currently the focus of many debates, primarily focused on how best to prepare engineering students to innovate effectively in a future that is increasingly global. A global future means engineers will not be able to solely depend on their personal and local experiences when designing solution...

This paper introduces the concept of “compassionate engineering,” a process adopted by our research group, TechBridgeWorld, for developing technology solutions that are relevant and accessible to people in underserved communities. The stages of compassionate engineering include establishing partnerships based in trust, assessing needs, participator...

Task allocation is an important aspect of many multi-robot systems. The features and complexity of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problems are dictated by the requirements of the particular domain under consideration. These problems can range from those involving instantaneous distribution of simple, independent tasks among members of a homogen...

As robots are increasingly employed for distributed missions, an important problem that needs to be solved is the Autonomous Recharging Problem (ARP); that is, effectively planning and coordinating when, where, and how to recharge robots to maximize operational efficiency. In this paper, we define the ARP and clearly describe the relevant technical...

Low-cost navigation solutions for indoor environments have a variety of real-world applications ranging from emergency evacuation to mobility aids for people with disabilities. Chal-lenges for commercial indoor navigation solutions include robust localization, intuitive recognition of user navigation goals, and efficient route-planning and re-plann...

Low-cost localization solutions for indoor environments have a variety of real-world applications ranging from emergency evacuation to mobility aids for people with disabilities. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for indoor localization using a commercial smart-phone combining dead reckoning and Wifi signal strength fingerprinting. Addition...

In this paper, we present an approach to bounded optimal planning and flexible execution for a robot team performing a set of spatially distributed tasks related by temporal ordering constraints such as precedence or synchronization. Furthermore, the manner in which the temporal constraints are satisfied impacts the overall utility of the team, due...

In earlier work closed-form trajectory bending was shown to provide an efficient and accurate out-of-core solution for loop-closing exactly sparse trajectories. Here we extend it to fuse exactly sparse trajectories, obtained from relative pose estimates, with absolute orientation data. This allows us to close-the-loop using absolute orientation dat...

This extended abstract addresses the optimal assignment of spatially distributed tasks to a team of heterogeneous mobile agents in domains in which tasks may be related by precedence or simultaneity constraints and have a choice of locations at which they can be performed. The manner in which constraints are satisfied and the locations chosen for t...

Structure-From-Motion (SFM) methods, using stereo data, are among the best performing algorithms for motion estimation from video imagery, or visual odometry. Critical to the success of SFM methods is the quality of the initial pose estimation algorithm from feature correspondences. In this work, we evaluate the performance of pose estimation algor...

Many applications require teams of robots to cooperatively execute complex tasks. Among these domains are some that require robots to interact closely at particular times and locations to accomplish some task components, but otherwise allow the team members to act independently. Successful execution in such domains often requires agent interactions...

We address the problem of optimally assigning spatially distributed tasks to a team of heterogeneous mobile agents in domains with inter-task temporal constraints, such as precedence constraints. Due to delay penalties, satisfying the temporal constraints impacts the overall team cost. We present a mathematical model of the problem, a benchmark any...

While the needs and applications for computing technology have been growing, the enrollment and interest in Computer Science (CS) at the university level has not been growing in proportion. Moreover, the increasing prevalence of globalization requires a new set of skills for future technology leaders. These skills include the ability to work well i...

Tactile graphics allow the visually impaired to perceive two-dimensional imagery, which is an essential part of experiencing the world and learning several subjects such as science and geography. In the developed world, such graphics are available to blind students from an early age, and students grow up familiar with tactile representations of ima...

Although para-social workers carry the primary responsibility in providing essential services to the growing population of orphans and vulnerable children in Tanzania, they are often not paid for this work. Moreover, these para-social workers are unable to access governmental resources due to the lack of an efficient means of reporting their needs...

The vision of humans and robots working together as peers to accomplish complex tasks has motivated many recent research endeavors with a variety of applications ranging from lunar construction to soccer. However, much of this research is still at an early stage, and many challenges still remain in realizing this vision. A key requirement for enabl...

Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) is not new -- numerous important though relatively low-profile projects have been building the foundations of ICTD for many years. What's new are its name and, more important, the increased recognition the field has lately been receiving and its potential for exerting greater influence...

This paper describes a research endeavor aimed at exploring the role that technology can play in improving child literacy in developing communities. An initial pilot study and subsequent four-month-long controlled field study in Ghana investigated the viability and effectiveness of an automated reading tutor in helping urban children enhance their...

This work advances the state-of-the-art in assistive technology for the visually impaired by enhancing an automated tutor designed to teach beginner-level braille writing skills. The hardware component of the tutor is a low-cost device that provides an intelligent tactile interface that connects to a laptop or desktop computer. We demonstrate the m...

Less than 3% of the 145 million blind people living in developing countries are literate (Helander, Prejudice and dignity: An introduction to community-based rehabilitation. New York: UNDP 1998). This low literacy rate is partly due to the lack of trained teachers and the challenges associated with learning to write braille on a traditional slate a...

Welcome to the 3rd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009). It is with great pleasure that we present the ICTD2009 proceedings, which include all of the full papers presented at the conference in Doha, Qatar, held on 17-19 April 2009.

Many applications require teams of robots to cooperatively execute tasks. Among these domains are those in which successful coordination must respect intra-path constraints, which are constraints that occur on the paths of agents and affect route planning. This work focuses on multi-agent coordination for disaster response with intra-path precedenc...

ICTD has become a truly global undertaking, bringing together north and south, rich and poor, rural and urban, researcher and practitioner, technologist and social scientist—all striving to work toward a better life for the least privileged.

Less than 3% of the 145 million blind people living in developing countries are literate. This low literacy rate is partly due to the lack of trained teachers and the challenges associated with learning to write Braille on a traditional slate and stylus. These challenges include writing from right to left, writing mirrored images of letters, and re...

Planning autonomous long range traverses for planetary exploration and similar robotic missions requires several important capabilities. These include the ability to generate smooth, optimal paths, the ability to reason about constrained path-dependent state variables such as energy, and the ability to replan rapidly in response to new information....

This paper presents a learning-enhanced market-based task allocation approach for oversubscribed domains. In oversubscribed domains all tasks cannot be completed within the required deadlines due to a lack of resources. We focus specifically on domains where tasks can be generated throughout the mission, tasks can have different levels of importanc...

This paper addresses the challenges and benefits of undergraduate robotics education in technologically underserved communities. We present two robotics courses that the authors designed and taught in Qatar and Ghana. While different in context and setting, these courses share a similar structure and approach. We describe and analyze our experience...

This paper presents a cultural perspective towards thinking about, and acting on, issues concerning gender and computer science and related fields. We posit and demonstrate that the notion of a gender divide in how men and women relate to computing, traditionally attributed to gender differences, is largely a result of cultural and environmental co...

Robotics is a unique educational tool for many reasons including its ability to inspire students and motivate them to be creative. This paper presents our experiences in designing and teaching introductory robotics courses in Qatar and Ghana, two contexts in which robotics is not established and computing technology is in its early stages of impact...

Soil maps are essential resources to soil scientists and researchers in any fields related to soil, land use, species conservation, hunger reduction, social development, etc. However, creating detailed soil maps is an expensive and time consuming task that most developing nations cannot afford. In recent years, there has been a significant shift to...

Creating technology that is relevant and accessible to developing communities is an emerging area of scholarly and practical importance. Diversity in both the creators and consumers of advanced tech- nology is required to develop sustained and useful applications of robotics, AI, and other technical fields in developing regions. Increased diversity...

Abstract In this paper, we present the dynamic Hungarian algorithm, applicable to optimally solving the assignment problem in situations with changing edge costs or weights. This problem is relevant, for example, in a transportation domain where the unexpected closing of a road translates to changed transportation costs. When such cost changes occu...

Market-based multirobot coordination approaches have received significant attention and are growing in popularity within the robotics research community. They have been successfully implemented in a variety of domains ranging from mapping and exploration to robot soccer. The research literature on market-based approaches to coordination has now rea...

There are some arguments that suggest women need academic handholding, such as a "female friendly" curriculum, in order for them to participate and be successful in computer science and related fields. Then there are other arguments that suggest we need to change the field to suit women or help women adjust to the field. In this paper we present a...

As we progress towards a world where robots play an integral role in society, a critical problem that remains to be solved is the pickup team challenge; that is, dynamically formed heterogeneous robot teams executing coordinated tasks where little information is known a priori about the tasks, the robots, and the environments in which they would op...

In this new era of space exploration where human-robot teams are envisioned maintaining a long-term presence on other planets, effective coordination of human-robot teams is paramount. Two critical research challenges that must be solved to realize this vision are the human-robot team chal- lenge and the pickup-team challenge. In this paper, we ad-...

This paper presents DD* Lite, an efficient incremental search algorithm for problems that can capitalize on state domi- nance. Dominance relationships between nodes are used to prune graphs in search algorithms. Thus, exploiting state dominance relationships can considerably speed up search problems in large state spaces, such as mobile robot path...

Abstract In this work we propose a market-based task allocation system for disaster response domains. We model the disaster response domain,as a team of robots cooperating to extinguish a series of fires that arise due to a disaster. Each fire is associated with a time-decreasing reward for successful mitigation, with the value of the initial rewar...

While market-based approaches, such as TraderBots, have shown much promise for efficient coordination of multirobot teams, the cost estimation mechanism and its impact on solution efficiency has not been investigated. This paper provides a first analysis of the cost estimation process in the TraderBots approach applied to a distributed sensing task...

The growing demand for technological innovation to empower developing communities and enable sustainable development requires new and creative educational initiatives. Thus, well designed higher educational initiatives geared towards appropriate technology for developing communities can have a significant global impact. This paper presents the chal...

The growing demand for technological innovation to enable empowerment of developing communities requires new and creative educational initiatives. Thus, well designed higher educational initiatives geared towards appropriate technology for developing communities can have a significant global impact. This paper presents the challenges and benefits o...

Abstract As we progress towards a world where robots play an integral role, a critical problem,that remains to be solved is that of dynamically,formed heterogeneous robot teams where little information is known a-priori about the tasks, the robots, and the environments,in which they will operate. We define this challenge as the Pickup Team Challeng...

This paper reports details of a versatile implementation of the TraderBots approach: A market-based approach to multirobot coordination. The architectural layout, implementation details, and variety of features are described. Experimental results are presented using a team of Pioneer II DX robots engaged in exploration and distributed sensing tasks...

Multi-robot teams can improve safety and increase human productivity for operations in hazardous environments. To be effective, a control scheme is needed to decompose a task, assign subtasks to individual robots, and synchronize execution. We have developed a market model for this control scheme that realizes the best of both centralized and distr...

Robustness is crucial for any robot team, especially when operating in dynamic environments. The physicality of robotic systems and their interactions with the environment make them highly prone to malfunctions of many kinds. Three principal categories in the possible space of robot malfunctions are communication failures, partial failure of robot...

This paper presents a comparative study between three multirobot coordination schemes that span the spectrum of coordination approaches; a fully centralized approach that can produce optimal solutions, a fully distributed behavioral approach with minimal planned interaction between robots, and a market approach which sits in the middle of the spect...

The problem of efficient multirobot coordination has risen to the forefront of robotics research in recent years. Interest in this problem is motivated by the wide range of application domains demanding multirobot solutions. In general, multirobot coordination strategies assume either a centralized approach, where a single robot/agent plans for the...

This paper describes a market-based planning mechanism used for task and resource allocation within a larger distributed, multi-robot control and coordination architecture. We are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer -- at the behavioral level, the robots...

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a multi-abstraction level autonomous control system using the Intelligent Distributed Execution Architecture (IDEA). The basic hypothesis of IDEA is that a large control system can be structured as a collection of interacting control agents, each organized around the same fundamental structure....

This paper presents a market-based, multi-robot planning capability, designed as part of a distributed, layered architecture for multi-robot control and coordination. More specifically, we are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer: the behavioral level, the...

This paper presents an architecture that enables multiple robots to explicitly coordinate actions at multiple levels of abstraction. In particular, we are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer -- at the behavioral level, the robots create distributed contro...

This paper presents an architecture that enables multiple robots to explicitly coordinate actions at multiple levels of abstraction. In particular, we are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer { at the behavioral level, the robots create distributed control...

Multirobot coordination, if made efficient and robust, promises high impact on automation. The challenge is to enable robots to work together in an intelligent manner to execute a global task. The market approach has had considerable success in the multirobot coordination domain. However the implementation of this approach to date restricts the neg...

This work presents a novel approach to efficient multi-robot mapping and exploration which exploits a market architecture in order to maximize information gain while minimizing incurred costs. This system is reliable and robust in that it can accommodate dynamic introduction and loss of team members in addition to being able to withstand communicat...

This paper describes the navigation system used on a prototype sun-synchronous robot. Sun-synchrony is a concept that will enable exploration missions by solar-powered rovers that could last months or years. This paper presents the navigation algorithms developed for traversing natural terrain robustly. The novel elements of this work are the refin...

Multirobot coordination, if made efficient and robust, promises high impact on automation. The challenge is to enable robots to work together in an intelligent manner to execute a global task. The market approach has had considerable success in the multirobot coordination domain. This paper investigates the effects of introducing opportunistic opti...

Sun-synchronous exploration is accomplished by reasoning about sunlight: where the Sun is in the sky, where and when shadows will fall, and how much power can be obtained through various courses of action. In July 2001 a solar-powered rover, named Hyperion, completed two sun-synchronous exploration experiments in the Canadian high arctic (75°N). Us...

The problem of efficient multirobot coordination has risen to the forefront of robotics research in recent years. Interest in this problem is motivated by the wide range of application domains demanding multirobot solutions. In general, multirobot coordination strategies assume either a centralized approach, where a single robot/agent plans for the...

In the extreme environments posed by war fighting, fire fighting, and nuclear accident response, the cost of direct human exposure is levied in terms of injury and death. Robotic alternatives must address effective operations while removing humans from danger. This is profoundly challenging, as extreme environments inflict cumulative performance da...

The nursery industry faces an impending crisis due to lack of labor resources. A majority of the manual labor in container nurseries involves moving containers from the field to other locations and back. Typically 3-4 laborers team up to load the containers onto trailers and then drive them to the required destination where they are unloaded. The T...

This paper reports the design specification and process for constructing a gas identification instrument using MEMS technology for the purpose of detecting buried land mines. The aim is to design an instrument to detect and identify gases that leak from buried land mines using an array of sensors and a pattern recognition/signature identification s...

The coordination of a large group of robots to solve a specified task is a difficult problem. Centralized approaches can be computationally intractable, brittle, and unresponsive to change. Distributed approaches are not as prone to these problems, but they can be highly sub-optimal. This work introduces a novel approach for coordinating robots bas...

To realize the vision of intelligent transportation systems with fully automated vehicles, there is a need for high-level planning for single vehicles as well as fleets of vehicles. This paper addresses the problem of optimally assigning and scheduling a set of spatially distributed tasks to a fleet of vehi-cles working together to achieve a high-l...

Less than 3% of the 145 million blind people liv-ing in developing countries are literate. This low literacy rate is in part due to the lack of trained teachers and the challenges associated with learn-ing to write Braille on a traditional slate and sty-lus. These challenges include writing from right to left, writing mirrored images of letters, an...

Multirobot coordination remains a challenging problem with potentially high impact on space applications if solved. The challenge is to enable robots to work together in an intelligent manner to execute a global task. This paper describes a market-based approach suitable for complex multirobot space applications. The market approach has had conside...

The problem of efficient multirobot coordination has risen to the forefront of robotics research inrecent years. Interest in this problem is motivated by the wide range of application domains demandingmultirobot solutions. In general, multirobot coordination strategies assume either a centralized approach,where a single robot/agent plans for the gr...

Abstract As robotic technology improves, we charge robots with increasingly varied and difficult tasks. Many of these tasks can potentially be completed,better by a team of robots working,together than by individual robots working,alone. Coordination can lead to faster task completion, increased robustness, higher-quality solutions, and the complet...

Task allocation impacts the performance efficiency of agent teams in sig-nificant ways. Due to their efficient and proven performance, Market-based task al-location approaches have grown in popularity for many such multi-agent domains. In addition, market-based approaches are very well suited to dynamic domains such as emergency response, in which...