Research Position in (Physics Applied)Computer Science
The departments of Physics & Astronomy and Mathematics & Computer Science of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam are looking for a
Postdoc (2 years) or PhD student (4 years)
to work on human interaction with robots from virtual reality environments
(Cave, Tiled Display)This research is part of a larger, Progress funded, programme carried out in collaboration with the Faculty of Sciences of the UvA aiming at developing “Framework for Maintaining a Shared World Model in Dynamic Environments Between Differentiated Embedded Systems and Allowing Interaction with Human Supervisors”.
The research plan for the project covers three sub-projects: (i) the communication infrastructure, (ii) the world model, and (iii) the interaction with the human observer. This framework will be tested by using it within the context of RoboCup, in which all participating groups are active.
At the Vrije universiteit the research will be focused onto the third item. In this research the state-of-the-art tiled display, currently being developed, (http://www.icwall.nl) will be used. Furthermore use will be made of the Cave of SARA.
An essential ingredient of the framework is the possibility/necessity for (rapid) human interaction. The type of human interaction will depend on the information displayed and thus on the available bandwidth. Ideally a human observer would be capable of defining a number of events that would automatically trigger a call for his interaction. Within the project we will investigate the applicability of VR-techniques and high resolution displays for this type of interaction.
Research topics here are:
The effect of latency on the validity of human decisions,
A structure for integration in real time of a human in the system,
The dependency of the local decision structure on the actual coordination of the human observer,
The development of a user-definable system for generating triggers for human intervention.
The dependency of the (correctness of the) human interaction on the information displayed.
The position is per direct available. Applicants should have recently obtained a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, or other relevant fields. For information you may contact one of the following persons:
· Prof. Dr. H.E. Bal (bal@cs.vu.nl), tel, +31 20 444 7733,
· Dr. H.J.W. Spoelder (hs@nat.vu.nl), tel. +31 20 444 7459,
The research at the University of Amsterdam (headed by prof. Groen and Boasson) deals with the interaction infrastructure and aspects of the shared world model. The communication infrastructure is of paramount importance for the network. It covers both the hardware and the associated software. In this project we will use at least three different types of communication: communication over fixed lines, wireless communication, and GSM based point-to-point communication.
Research topics are:
Adaptation of the communication structure to the dynamics of the clusters due to the migration of systems in and out of the clusters,
Redundancy of the communication structure
Load-balancing in time-constrained environments
Trade-offs between bandwidth and computational time (i.e. by preprocessing local data)
For real-world autonomous systems, maintaining a world model is an essential component for fusing information obtained by the system itself with information obtained and communicated by other systems.
Here research topics are:
Effects of bandwidth restrictions and processing limitations on fusion methods and dynamic modeling,
Strategies to actively control the latencies of the network in time-critical updates of the world model.
This work has already been started.