Camra's Peak District Pub Walks by Bob Steel

Their work, “Convolutional-Features Analysis and Control for Mobile Visual Scene Perception,” is supported by a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Mellowes ’60 Professor in Mechanical Engineering. “Once you have robots that cooperate you can do all sorts of things,” said Kilian Weinberger, associate professor of computer science, who is collaborating with Silvia Ferrari, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the project’s principal investigator, and Mark Campbell, the John A. Beyond surveillance, the new technology might help when teams of robots relieve humans of dangerous jobs like disposing of landmines, cleaning up after a nuclear meltdown or surveying the damage after a flood or hurricane. The researchers are developing a system to enable teams of robots to share information as they move around and, if necessary, get help in interpreting what they see, enabling them to conduct surveillance as a single entity with many eyes. According to Cornell researchers, this might be a job robots could do better than humans, by communicating at the speed of light and sharing images.

If you were monitoring a security camera and saw someone set down a backpack and walk away, you might pay special attention – especially if you had been alerted to watch that particular person. Seeing many possible views of the same area from fixed and mobile cameras could be confusing to a human, but a computer can combine it all, track people and objects and notice significant events.

Camra's Peak District Pub Walks by Bob Steel