Congratulations to WPI Mechanical and Robotics Engineering Professor Greg Fischer for his NSF Award entitled: NRI: Collaborative Research Software Framework for Research in Semi-Autonomous Teleoperation. This award is a collaborative effort between WPI, University of Washington, and Johns Hopkins University through the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) program.
This work will support the development of a collaborative open hardware and software infrastructure to support research and education in cutting edge human-robot collaborative areas such as semi-autonomous teleoperation and medical robotics. While the infrastructure originates in the medically inspired Raven-II and dVRK robotic surgery platforms, this proposal targets the needs of a much larger community via the integration of other robots and haptic devices and simulated robots. The impact of this proposal is:
- The project will enable and accelerate research in multiple technical areas (e.g., human/robot collaboration, supervised autonomy, 3D augmented reality user interfaces), and in multiple application domains (e.g., robotic surgery, industrial, space and undersea robotics).
- It will provide a simulation environment for teaching large groups of students in the context of a vibrant community, and support existing and future robust hardware/software platforms for hands-on research experience for smaller groups of students.
- Most of the software infrastructure will be usable with other platforms.
- Through the common API and simulation framework, it will ease barriers to entry for new researchers to apply their ideas to this growing field.