CISC849 S2011
From class_wiki
Course information
- Title CISC849 Environmental Robotics & Vision for Animal Behavior Analysis
- Description We will examine the increasing use of robots and computer vision for environmental monitoring and animal behavior analysis, both in the field and in the laboratory. In recent years, autonomous ground, air, and underwater vehicles equipped with a wide array of sensors have been deployed under ice sheets, on the flanks of volcanoes, and high in forest canopies in order to collect climate and geological data. At the same time, automatic mining of video from cameras pointed at bird nests, insects in flight, and lab mice has created an exciting new tool for biology research. The course will survey sensors, algorithms, and applications through readings, presentations, and projects.
- When Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-3:15 pm
- Where Smith 102A
- Instructor Christopher Rasmussen, 446 Smith Hall, cer@cis.udel.edu
- Office hours Tuesdays 3:15-4:15 pm, Thursdays 12-1 pm
- Grading:
- 10% Find, describe ER/VABA system not in introductory lecture or on course page as of 2/15 (2 pages). Subject to instructor approval, you may later use this for presentation.
- 20% Oral paper presentation (individual, 30 minutes)
- 30% Two programming assignments
- 40% Final project (teams 1-3)
- 5% = 2 page proposal, including planned methods, citations of relevant papers, data sources, and division of labor
- 5% = Milestone reports
- 10% = Joint 15-minute presentation on final results, with accompanying slides
- 20% = Actual results and estimated effort, factoring in difficulty of problem tackled
Resources
- Miscellaneous science, field methods
- "Censusing primates by transect in a forest of known primate density" (requires SpringerLink), T. Defler and D. Pintor, International Journal of Primatology, 1985
- UD courses
- GEOG/GEOL 467 environmental field methods (ENSC 425 now?): 2000 assignments, 2003 syllabus
- BISC 312 -- Field Ecology
- Sensor networks
- "A macroscope in the redwoods" (requires ACM), G. Tolle et al., SenSys, 2005 (microclimate around large tree)
- "Canopy closure estimates with GreenOrbs: Sustainable sensing in the forest", L. Mo, Y. He, Y. Liu, J. Zhao, S. Tang, and X. Li, SenSys 2009 (estimating canopy cover in forests)
- "An Empirical Study of Collaborative Acoustic Source Localization", A. Ali et al., Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2007 (acoustic localization of marmots)
- "Revealing the hidden lives of underground animals using magneto-inductive tracking", A. Markham, N. Trigoni, S. Ellwood, and D. Macdonald, SenSys 2010 (badger tracking, above and below ground)
- "Hardware Design Experiences in ZebraNet", P. Zhang, C. Sadler, S. Lyon, and M. Martonosi", SenSys 2004
- "Automated species recognition of antbirds in a mexican rainforest using hidden markov models", V. Trifa, A. Kirschel, C. Taylor, and E. Vallejo, Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 2008 (recognizing bird calls)
- UGVs
- "Automatic Reconstruction of Tree Skeletal Structures from Point Clouds", Y. Livny, F. Yan, M. Olson, B. Chen, H. Zhang, and J. El-sana, SIGGRAPH Asia, 2010
- Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity
- "Two Years of Visual Odometry on the Mars Exploration Rovers", M. Maimone, Y. Cheng, and L. Matthies, JFR, 2007
- "Overview of the Mars Exploration Rovers' Autonomous Mobility and Vision Capabilities", M. Maimone, C. Leger, and J. Biesiadecki, ICRA Space Robotics Workshop, 2007
- AUVs
- DepthX for underwater caves
- Endurance for under-ice exploration and precursor to Europa mission
- "Coordinated Control of an Underwater Glider Fleet in an Adaptive Ocean Sampling Field Experiment in Monterey Bay", N. Leonard, D. Paley, R. Davis, D. Fratantoni, F. Lekien, and F. Zhang, JFR 2010
- "A Robotic System for Monitoring Carp in Minnesota Lakes", P. Tokekar, A. Studenski, D. Bhadauria, V. Isler, JFR 2010
- UAVs
- "Intuitive 3D Maps for MAV Terrain Exploration and Obstacle Avoidance", S. Weiss, M. Achtelik, L. Kneip, D. Scaramuzza, and R. Siegwart, UAV 2010
- VABA
- Caltech Ctrax (Flies), "High-throughput ethomics in large groups of Drosophila", K. Branson, A. Robie1, J. Bender, P. Perona, & M. Dickinson, Nature Methods, 2009
- UCSD Smart Vivarium (Mice)
- Georgia Tech BioTracking project (Bees, ants)
- "Embedded Imagers: Detecting, Localizing and Recognizing Objects and Events in Natural Habitats", T. Ko, J. Hyman, E. Graham, S. Soatto, and D. Estrin", Emerging Sensor Network Applications, 2010 (bird nest monitoring)
Schedule
Note: The blue squares in the "#" column below indicate Tuesdays.
| # | Date | Topic | Notes | Links/Readings | Assignments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Feb. 8 | Course introduction I | * Dennis Hong's TED 2010 talk Va. Tech. robot mechanisms: leg/wheel hybrid, climber for geology, crab, amoeba, hand, snake, humanoid (0'-12') | ||
| 2 | Feb. 10 | Course introduction II | Lecture slides |
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| 3 | Feb. 15 | Measuring simple environmental variables with sensor networks; basic field methods including transects | Lecture slides | ||
| 4 | Feb. 17 | Sensor networks for automatic detection/localization | Tracking/triangulating zebras, badgers, marmots |
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| 5 | Feb. 22
Register/add deadline Feb. 21 |
Filtering detections with advanced recognition techniques | Bird call recognition, bird nest image analysis |
Description of unlisted ER/VABA system due | |
| 6 | Feb. 24 | Vision tutorial, introduction to OpenCV | Background subtraction, tracking |
* "High-throughput ethomics in large groups of Drosophila" | HW #1 (vision) |
| 7 | Mar. 1 | Guest lecture on AUVs: Prof. Art Trembanis |
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| 8 | Mar. 3 | More on computer vision algorithms/OpenCV | |||
| 9 | Mar. 8 | Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) | HW #1 due | ||
| 10 | Mar. 10 | 3-D mapping and modeling | HW #2 (SLAM) | ||
| 11 | Mar. 15 | Visual odometry, mapping for UAVs | |||
| 12 | Mar. 17 | Case study: Mars rovers |
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| 13 | Mar. 22 | Multi-robot forest monitoring proposal | HW #2 due | ||
| 14 | Mar. 24 | More on forest monitoring, trail following | Paper presentation choice due | ||
| Mar. 29 | NO CLASS Spring break |
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| Mar. 31 | NO CLASS Spring break |
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| Apr. 5 | NO CLASS Instructor away |
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| 15 | Apr. 7
National Robotics Week demo in Washington D.C., April 9-11 |
Student presentations: P. Saponaro | |||
| 16 | Apr. 12 | Student presentations: A. Landwehr, J. Landwehr | |||
| 17 | Apr. 14
Withdraw deadline Apr. 18 |
Student presentations: J. Ye, V. Ly | Final project proposals due | ||
| 18 | Apr. 19 | Student presentations: Y. Lu, M. Kocamaz | |||
| 19 | Apr. 21 | Student presentations: P. Kannappan, C. Thorpe | |||
| 20 | Apr. 26 | Student presentations: G. Su | |||
| 21 | Apr. 28 | Kinect body pose recognition |
"Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images", J. Shotton et al., CVPR 2011 |
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| 22 | May 3 | Project milestone 1 presentations | |||
| 23 | May 5 | Footstep planning on rough terrain |
"Learning locomotion over rough terrain using terrain templates", M. Kalakrishnan et al., IROS 2009 |
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| 24 | May 10 | Project milestone 2 presentations | |||
| 25 | May 12 | Applications of learning by demonstration | Slides | Final project due | |
| 26 | May 17 | Project presentations | |||
| NO FINAL EXAM |
