The Spot four-legged robot from Boston Dynamics (external)

The thesis is offered in collaboration with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) at Kjeller.

Most of us have seen the yellow, four-legged robot from Boston Dynamics. Now you have the chance to work with Spot!

The robot provides an off the shelf platform with advanced mobility and perception. This means that you as master students can use a cutting edge robot without having to worry about all the low level control that often gets in the way of efficient research.

Possible topics:

  • Advanced sensing - The robot has five stereo cameras integrated, and we have official sensors like a LIDAR, a panorama camera, and a pan-tilt-zoom camera that can be mounted. Other interesting sensors can be easily added. Everything from raw processing of sensor data through deep neural networks to how to build a complete understanding of the environment can be investigated.
  • Planning and adaptation - How should the robot go about solving the tasks we ask of it? This robot can go where none of our other autonomous vehicles can, but to do so efficiently it needs to be able to plan ahead, and to adapt when changes inevitably occurs to its environment.
  • Mapping and navigation - GPS-based navigation might work for a car driving on an open road, but for a robot that can walk indoors or in challenging terrain under tree cover, we need more robust solutions. There are many approaches that are based on different sensor modalities, and investigating these allows a more independent and robust robot.
  • Collaboration and autonomy - This is a highly capable robot, but it is only when it is combined with our other autonomous platforms that we start to see the whole picture. We use everything from small drones to large tracked vehicles, and how these exchange information and collaborate is an exciting topic with many possibilities.
  • Human-robot interaction - How do we tell the robot what to do? And how should it communicate information back to us in a way that we understand? This is a very wide area that covers everything from technical user interface design to gesture and voice recognition.

These are only a few suggestions for interesting areas that could be investigated using the Spot robot. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any other ideas.

 

Publisert 20. aug. 2021 09:07 - Sist endret 20. aug. 2021 09:07