The Great Tape Prank

It's late on a Friday afternoon here in Brisbane, so it's time for a fun story about a prank my PhD labmates played on me two decades ago, and how it unexpectedly led to my most highly cited and awarded research work. 📚🤓

At the time, I was working on our #RatSLAM system - a neurally-inspired robot mapping and navigation system that performed SLAM - Simultaneous Localization And Mapping. 🤖🗺️

SLAM is the process of a robot exploring and mapping a new environment while keeping track of its location. It's a big topic in robotics and computer vision. 🔍🚀

One day, my labmates put tape over the camera on our Pioneer 3-DX mobile robot, blinding it, and waited for it to fail. 🎥🙈 EXCEPT, the RatSLAM system continued to work, and I didn't initially notice any change. 😲

A SLAM system needs motion information and a way to recognize places it has visited before. The tape destroyed the camera's detail perception, but it still registered an "average brightness" of the scene, becoming a single pixel light intensity meter. 💡📷

In our stable office environment, the SLAM system continued to work because the light intensity readings were consistent and varied distinctively across locations. 🏢🔆

Years later, this discovery informed our #SeqSLAM system and our "How Low Can You Go" research, pushing the boundaries on low resolution and robust visual localization in specific use cases like path-like environments. The work won awards, led to millions in funded research & projects, and much follow on work. 🏆💡📈

So, while I’m not encouraging pranks, remember that when something goes wrong, it might lead to a breakthrough. You never know what you might discover! 🌟🤖🔬

📖 SeqSLAM: https://lnkd.in/drCN5B8s

📖 How low can you go? https://lnkd.in/dJhmzWj9

📖 Follow on work: https://lnkd.in/dKwWYRPn

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