Frederick (Fritz) Heckel

Research Interests

I am a third year doctoral student in the Media & Machines lab at Washington University in St. Louis. I am interested in robotics and vision, with an emphasis on topics related to human-robot interaction. My current main interest is in Theory of Mind; I'm working on the problem of the "intentionality detector" as described by Simon Baron-Cohen, or the ToBy module of Alan Leslie. So far, this has involved some simulations of the games of tag/freeze tag.

I've also spent some time working on robotics middleware. Visit wurde.sf.net for more information on WURDE. Other work has included a framework for accelerating object detection (paper in submission) with Michael Dixon.

Finally, I've spent some time trying to get HRIWeb.org off the ground. The site is all there, but we still need some content. It's meant to be a site to help improve communication and collaboration among HRI researchers.

Publications:

Washington University in St. Louis

Frederick Heckel and William D. Smart, "Mapping the Field of Human-Robot Interaction" to appear in Proceedings of NEWHRI Workshop, ICRA 2008, Pasadena, May 2008.(pdf)
Michael Dixon, Frederick Heckel, Robert Pless and William D. Smart, "Faster and More Accurate Face Detection on Mobile Robots Using Geometric Constraints" in Proceedings of IROS 2007, San Diego, October 2007.(pdf)
Frederick Heckel and William D. Smart, "Non-Speech Aural Communication for Robots". In "Aurally Informed Performance: Integrating Machine Listening and Auditory Presentation in Robotic Systems: Papers from the 2006 AAAI Fall Symposium", pp. 28-32, AAAI Technical Report FS-06-01. (pdf)
Frederick Heckel, Tim Blakely, Michael Dixon, Chris Wilson, and William D. Smart, "The WURDE Robotics Middleware and RIDE Multi-Robot Tele-Operation Interface", AAAI Mobile Robotics Workshop, Boston, July 2006. (pdf)

Swarthmore College

B. A. Maxwell, N. Ward, and F. Heckel, "A Configurable Interface and Architecture for Robot Rescue", AAAI Mobile Robotics Workshop, San Jose, July 2004.(pdf)
B. A. Maxwell, N. Ward, and F. Heckel, "Game-Based Design of Human-Robot Interfaces for Urban Search and Rescue", CHI 2004 Fringe, http://www.chiplace.org/chifringe/2004/796.pdf, April 2004.(pdf)
B. A. Maxwell, N. Ward, and F. Heckel, "A Human-Robot Interface for Urban Search and Rescue", in Proc. of AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition Workshop, Acapulco, pp. 7-12, August 2003.(pdf)