Automation Laboratory
My senior year I joined Professor Ken Goldberg's Automation Lab - a laboratory dedicated to robotics and algorithms research. Among other successful projects, this lab has published major results in collaborative filtering and medical applications of computational geometry problems.
Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments
I am currently working with the Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments (CONE) project as an algorithms developer. The primary objective of this effort is to advance the understanding of hybrid autonomous/collaborative systems through a network of sensors, actuators, and human input. We will achieve this by designing a minimally intrusive surveillance system through which users can observe animals in their natural environments. This project has raised several fascinating problems, including the one that I am working on:
The system is designed to queue frame (picture) requests from sensor data and online users. Unfortunately, not all of these requests can be met within a reasonable amount of time, since the camera can take several seconds to physically rotate to the desired position, focus, and take a picture. Consequently, we are designing a method that considers certain user attributes to assign a priority rank to each frame request. The natural problem that arises, however, is how to decide which frame requests the camera should acquiesce and in what order. This problem can easily be shown to be NP-complete, as it can be reduced to a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem.