Kurt Konolige's Home Page (original) (raw)

Hey, this is my homepage.

	Kurt Konolige Senior Computer Scientist Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025 (650) 859-2788 kurt #at# videredesign #dot# com Consulting Professor Computer Science Department Stanford University

SLAM Summer School 2006 PPT slides

Current Research Areas

	SLAM Simultaneous Localization and Mapping in indoor environments, using probabilistic constraints.In the Centibots project, we developed distributed mapping algorithms, and controlled a team of 100 robots. Check out the great maps!
	Visual Navigation Laser rangefinders are great, but using vision for navigation has some advantages: low cost, low power, and color. We are working on algorithms for localization and map-making with just vision sensors.In the Learning Applied to Ground Robotics (LAGR) project, we have programmed an outdoor robot to autonomously explore natural offroad terrain while building maps and reaching a goal.
	Small Vision System SRI's Stereo Engine is the fastest available algorithm giving quality stereo results. It exists in both software and hardware implementations.New in 2006 - realtime 640x480 stereo on a low-power (<1W) FPGA - Stereo on a Chip (STOC). The images at the left were created using the STOC device. The top image is the flat camera view; the bottom image is the 3D reconstruction of the scene done on the STOC. Click on the bottom image for a VRML animation (2 MB - must have a VRML-enable browser, e.g., Cortona). When the VRML view appears, click on the center of the image to animate it. See the Videre Design implementation here.
	Saphira Robot Architecture It isn't easy to transport a 300-lb robot to demos or classrooms. So over several courses at Stanford University I developed a small robot with most of Flakey's capabilities; these robots were called Erratics, from the Latin root of "to wander" (left picture). Well, they were a little flaky, too. Now, I am developing a new Erratic platform for research and service robotics - check it out here. My class at Stanford introduces students to real-world programming of mobile robots.

Publications

Colleagues
I owe a lot to the students and researchers who have visited SRI and worked with me. Current external collaborators are:

Luca Iocchi Postdoc, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Dieter Fox, University of Washington

Past visitors:

Steffen Guttman Postdoc, University of Freiburg (Germany)
Sebastian Grange Graduate student, EPFL
Christopher Eveland Graduate student, University of Rochester
Max P Bajracharya Summer intern (undergraduate), MIT