Robotics; Human-Robot Interaction; Novel/Non-standard computer interfaces; Assistive Robotics

• Robots for Humanity: Along with collaborators at Willow Garage, and the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, I'm working on enabling persons with severe motor disabilities to use assistive mobile manipulators (AAMs) in their homes. Specifically, I'm working on moving interfaces away from the screen, to be embedded in the real world, tailored to the task at hand.

• Adapting RIDE, a computer game-like interface designed for controlling mobile robots, for use with a multitouch interface. The goal is to use this interface to more effectively supervise large groups (or individual) of autonomous mobile robots.
• Remote Robotic Exploration and Experimentation: Working on a system to for teleoperation of robots, allowing people to explore Colby College's art museum from St. Louis.

I have contributed several packages to wu-ros-pkg, Washington University's ROS stacks, including communication, and several packages currently in internal development.

• Latex
• Python
• MATLAB
• Hardware Designs

[1]	Daniel A. Lazewatsky, Bogumil Giertler, Martha Witick, Leah Perlmutter, Bruce A. Maxwell, and William D. Smart. Context-aware video compression for mobile robots. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, pages 4115 –4120, sept. 2011. [ bib ] Operating robots across networks with unknown, bandwidth, latency and other conditions presents difficulty when the operation depends on real-time feedback and control. Standard video compression methods do a good job compressing arbitrary video, but do not take domain knowledge into account when more information about the video is known beforehand. We have incorporated robot odometry into the video pipeline, allowing video quality to be selectively reduced at times when odometry suggests that such a reduction will not adversely affect task performance of human operators. We found that selectively reducing video quality significantly reduced bandwidth usage, increasing the robot's responsiveness and controllability, while having no measurable effect on task performance.
[2]	Daniel A. Lazewatsky and William D. Smart. An inexpensive robot platform for teleoperation and experimentation. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011), 2011. [ bib ] Most commercially-available robots are either aimed at the research community, or are designed with a single purpose in mind. The extensive hobbyist community has tended to focus on the hardware and the low-level software aspects. We claim that there is a need for a low-cost, general-purpose robot, accessible to the hobbyist community, with sufficient computation and sensing to run “research-grade” software. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of such a robot. We explicitly outline our design goals, and show how a capable robot can be assembled from off-the-shelf parts, for a modest cost, by a single person with only a few tools. We also show how the robot can be used as a low-cost telepresence platform, giving the system a concrete purpose beyond being a low-cost development platform.
[3]	Daniel A. Lazewatsky and William D. Smart. A panorama interface for telepresence robots. In Proceeding of the 6th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, HRI '11, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM. [ bib ] Telepresence robots are becoming increasingly popular and are increasingly ready to enter use in the real world as stand-ins for remote humans. It is useful, but currently uncommon, to provide the human operator with an approximation of peripheral vision and the ability to saccade around the scene. We have developed an interface which provides peripheral vision to a remote operator by using a motorized pan-tilt camera to create a panorama, and enables the operator to move the camera's gaze within that panorama.

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This file was generated by bibtex2html 1.96.

danpapers.bib

@inproceedings{lazewatsky:compression,
  author = {Lazewatsky, Daniel A. and Giertler, Bogumil and Witick, Martha and Perlmutter, Leah and Maxwell, Bruce A. and Smart, William D.},
  booktitle = {Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on},
  title = {Context-aware video compression for mobile robots},
  year = {2011},
  month = {sept.},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {4115 -4120},
  abstract = {Operating robots across networks with unknown, bandwidth, latency and other conditions presents difficulty when the operation depends on real-time feedback and control. Standard video compression methods do a good job compressing arbitrary video, but do not take domain knowledge into account when more information about the video is known beforehand. We have incorporated robot odometry into the video pipeline, allowing video quality to be selectively reduced at times when odometry suggests that such a reduction will not adversely affect task performance of human operators. We found that selectively reducing video quality significantly reduced bandwidth usage, increasing the robot's responsiveness and controllability, while having no measurable effect on task performance.},
  keywords = {},
  doi = {10.1109/IROS.2011.6048642},
  issn = {2153-0858}
}

@inproceedings{lazewatsky:missouri,
  abstract = {Most commercially-available robots are either aimed at the research
community, or are designed with a single purpose in mind.  The
extensive hobbyist community has tended to focus on the hardware and
the low-level software aspects.  We claim that there is a need for a
low-cost, general-purpose robot, accessible to the hobbyist community,
with sufficient computation and sensing to run ``research-grade''
software.  In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of
such a robot.  We explicitly outline our design goals, and show how a
capable robot can be assembled from off-the-shelf parts, for a modest
cost, by a single person with only a few tools.  We also show how the
robot can be used as a low-cost telepresence platform, giving the
system a concrete purpose beyond being a low-cost development
platform.},
  author = {Lazewatsky, Daniel A. and Smart, William D.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011)},
  date-modified = {2011-01-11 13:31:40 -0600},
  title = {An Inexpensive Robot Platform for Teleoperation and Experimentation},
  year = 2011
}

@inproceedings{lazewatsky:panorama,
  abstract = {Telepresence robots are becoming increasingly popular
and are increasingly ready to enter use in the real world as stand-ins
for remote humans. It is useful, but currently uncommon,
to provide the human operator with an approximation of peripheral
vision and the ability to saccade around the scene. We have developed
an interface which provides peripheral vision to a remote operator
by using a motorized pan-tilt camera to create a panorama, and enables
the operator to move the camera's gaze within that panorama.},
  author = {Lazewatsky, Daniel A. and Smart, William D.},
  title = {A Panorama Interface for Telepresence Robots},
  booktitle = {Proceeding of the 6th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction},
  series = {HRI '11},
  year = {2011},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-0561-7},
  location = {Lausanne, Switzerland},
  numpages = {2},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  keywords = {User Interfaces, Human-Robot Interaction, Graphical User Interface}
}

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This file was generated by bibtex2html 1.96.