Australian Centre for Field Robotics, USYD
314A
Level 3, The Link Building (J13)
Darlington 2006 NSW

Phone:

+61 2 9351 8145

Email:
p.elinas (at) acfr (dot) usyd (dot) edu (dot) au

• Since 2008, I have been working on a number of interesting projects in Computer Vision and decision making under uncertainty. I have recently developed a new method for image matching using local features. I am also working on a new computer vision system for the remote and autonomous monitoring of open pit mining operations. Moreover, I am working on a new sensory substitution system with the aim of developing a new device for helping the visually impaired. Lastly, I am working on applying decision theoretic planning methods to the problem of tactical decision making for ocean yacht racing and reinforcement learning methods for game-playing agents.

2006/2007

• In 2006 and 2007, we continued to work on visual SLAM and occupancy grid mapping using stereo vision applied to the development of an intelligent wheelchair in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Toronto. We also explored planning under uncertainty using continuous actions which we demonstrated working on our interactive robot HOMER.
• In November of 2007, I successfully defended my PhD thesis titled “On the design and implementation of decision-theoretic, interactive, and vision-driven mobile robots.”

2005

• In 2005, we designed and implemented SLAM for robots using stereo vision. Our approach is designed to handle 6 degrees of freedom motion and it only requires as input a sequence of stereo images. It is based on the RBPF using the Scale Invariant Feature Transform for robust data association and efficient data structures for map management. We also show that given our well localized camera, we can trivially construct 2D occupancy grid maps from correlation-based stereo; these maps are useful for path planning and exploration. For more info see our RSS 2005 and ICRA 2006 papers.

2004

• Currently, we are exploring a new method based on distributed MDPs for task specification and decision making on socially interactive mobile robots. We call these, Multiply Sectioned MDPs. We present our newest upgrade to our robot HOMER using this method. Go here for videos of HOMER delivering messages using the MS-MDP framework.

2003

• Recently, I have been doing some work on building 3D occupancy grids from stereo data. The grids are centered around the robot i.e. the goal is not to build large volumetric maps of whole buildings. At first, I plan to use these grids for obstacle avoidance during robot navigation.

2002

• In May of 2002, I finished my Master’s of Science degree in robotics. My thesis title was “Interactive Directed Exploration for Mobile Robots.” It involved creating a human-robot interface using speech and gestures that allowed a person to give commands to a robot. The task was one of directing the robot to different areas to explore. You can get a copy of my thesis in pdf format here.
• In the summer of 2002, we started a new project the Human Oriented MEssenger Robot, or just HOMER, that is tailored for studies in human-robot interaction. HOMER is a powerful compute engine on wheels as it has 4 on board computers. He uses a Bumblebee Stereo Camera system by PointGrey Research for perceiving his surrounding environment.

2001

• In August 2001 we were the winners of the AAAI “hors d’oeuvres anyone?” competition. For more information on the event including pictures and video follow this link.

2000

• Until the summer of 2000, I worked on the real-time rendering of 3D clouds. Our efforts were focused on using off-the-selve 3D accelerator boards to render Gardner style clouds in real-time. The background image of this page is one generated using this method.

1. Alex Mihailidis, Pantelis Elinas, Jennifer N. Boger and Jesse Hoey An Intelligent Powered Wheelchair to Enable Mobility of Cognitively Impaired Older Adults: an Anticollision System. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 15, 1, 2007
2. R. Sim, Pantelis Elinas and J. J. Little, A study of the Rao-Blackwellised particle filter for efficient and accurate vision-based SLAM, International Journal of Computer Vision/International Journal of Robotics Research Special Joint Issue on Vision in Robotics, ,vol 74, no 3, pp 303-318, Kluwer, Sept 2007
3. Pantelis Elinas and W. Stuerzlinger, Real-time rendering of 3D clouds, Journal for Graphics Tools, July 2001

Refereed Conference Articles

1. Pantelis Elinas, Matching Maximally Stable Extremal Regions Using Edge Information and the Chamfer Distance Function, The seventh Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2010), Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 2010.
2. Lochana Perera and Pantelis Elinas, On the observability of indirect filtering in vehicle tracking and localization using a fixed camera, The 13th International Conference on Information Fusion, Edinburgh, UK, 26-29 July 2010.
3. Pantelis Elinas, Multigoal planning for an autonomous blasthole drill, 19th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, pp. 342-245, Thessaloniki, Greece, Sept. 2009.
4. Pantelis Elinas and James J. Little, Decision-theoretic task coordination for a visually-guided interactive mobile robot. Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), San Diego, California, USA, 2007.
5. Robert Sim, Pantelis Elinas, Matt Griffin, Alex Shyr, and James J. Little , Design and analysis of a framework for real-time vision-based SLAM using Rao-Blackwellised particle filters, Proceedings of the 3rd Canadian Conference on Computer and Robotic Vision (CRV 2006), Quebec City, QC, 2006. Best Robotics Paper Award
   
6. Pantelis Elinas, Robert Sim and James J. Little, sigmaSLAM: Stereo Vision SLAM Using the Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter and a Novel Mixture Proposal Distribution, In Proc. ICRA, May 2006 (to appear) (pdf) (3D map movie, 2D occupancy grid movie)
7. Robert Sim, Pantelis Elinas, Matt Griffin, and James J. Little, Vision-based SLAM using the Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter, IJCAI Workshop on Reasoning with Uncertainty in Robotics (RUR), Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2005. (pdf)
8. Pantelis Elinas and J. Little, sigmaMCL: Monte-Carlo Localization for Mobile Robots with Stereo Vision, Robotics: Science and Systems, Boston, MA, USA, June 2005. (pdf)
9. Pantelis Elinas, E. Sucar, A. Reyes and J. Hoey, A Decision Theoretic Approach for Task Coordination in Social Robots, In the 13th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, September 20-22, 2004 Kurashiki, Okayama Japan. (pdf)
10. James J. Little, Jesse Hoey, and Pantelis Elinas, Visual Capabilities in an Interactive Autonomous Robot, In Springer Verlag Proceedings of the Dagstuhl Workshop on Cognitive Vision, 2004.
11. Pantelis Elinas, J.Hoey, D. Lahey, J. Montgomery, D. Murray, S. Se and J. J. Little. Waiting with Jose, a vision-based mobile robot. In Proc. ICRA, Washington D.C., May 2002.(pdf)
12. P.J. Thomas, P. Sinclair, A. Savchenko, P. Goldman, Pantelis Elinas and T. Pope, Signal Calibration and Stability in an Uncooled Integrated Bolometer Array, 1999 IEEE Aerospace conference, Snowmass at Aspen Colorado, March, 1999.

Workshop Articles

1. Pantelis Elinas, J. Hoey and J. J. Little, Human Oriented Messenger Robot, In Proc. of AAAI Spring Symposium, California, March 2003. (pdf)
2. Pantelis Elinas and J. J. Little, A robot control architecture for guiding a vision-based mobile robot. In Proc. of AAAI Spring Symposium in Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems, California, March 2002.(pdf)

The two largest yachts participating are the Wild Oats XI and Skandia which took an early lead way ahead of the pack. These 30-meter boats were moving much faster than all the others and so it is no surprise that they are way ahead of everyone else almost 1.5 days into the 628-mile race. I took a short video of the two yachts leading the race out of the harbor. The video is below.

Better think twice before messing with an octopus.