Chi Passes FOE

Yesterday, Chi Hay Tong passed his PhD final oral examination (FOE).  Congratulations, Dr. Tong!  Prof. Frank Dellaert, world-renowned expert on simultaneous localization and mapping from Georgia Tech, was the external examiner; he asked lots of excellent questions!  Prof. Radford Neal from UofT CS was the internal examiner and also weighed in with some fantastic questions about Gaussian Processes.  In the end, Chi emerged with a PhD and was rewarded with this very nice cookie, courtesy of the UofT Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics.  Chi will be hanging around ASRL for the next couple of months and then heading off into the world!

vSCOUT: First Ascent

We've been working with geologists from Western for several years now to look at how geological investigations could be done on other planets using robotics.  One thing we've learned is that a lot of the interesting places are not on flat ground but rather up on vertical surfaces where stratigraphy, for example, can be seen.  Enter vSCOUT, a mobile robot with a powered rope ascender to allow it to drive on near-vertical surfaces.  Today we demonstrated that we could successfully drive up and down the MarsDome at UTIAS under manual control.  The next step will be to do this autonomously using visual navigation and eventually we want to build photorealistic 3D models and more.

NCFRN Field Trials at UTIAS

From April 17 to 23 we held a series of field trials at UTIAS as part of the new NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network (NCFRN).  There were about 50 participants from UofT, McGill, Queen's, SFU, UAlberta, York, CSA, MDA, ODG, Clearpath, DRDC, and more.  The MarsDome really saw a lot of action with about 8 different robots being tested, both on the ground and in the air.  It was a fun event and we made lots of plans for future collaborations.  Here is a story by UofT media relations.

Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics Official Opening

A little delayed, but UofT announces the Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics today...and opens a flashy new website.