Yanan Liu

Email: yanan.liu@bristol.ac.uk

Supervisors: Walterio Mayol-Cuevas, Laurie Bose and Colin Greatwood

PhD Project Title: Agile navigation for mobile robots using the Pixel Processor Array

Research Group: Machine Vision

Biography

Principal goal for project:

Enable a mobile robot to explore the unknown environment agilely and autonomously using the Pixel Processor Array.

Research project:

Pixel Processor Arrays, with their ability to make decisions at the same location where the image is captured, allows for removing irrelevant parts of the image that are unrelated to the task at source as well as encourages a new way of thinking on how Computer Vision algorithms can work. Recently we have demonstrated applications such as target tracking and visual odometry operating at 1000Hz and with about 2W of power consumption. These two are orders of magnitude improvements compared with systems that use disparate and conventional components.

Visual-based robot navigation is a possible solution to enable the autonomy of mobile robots. A great number of researches have been done on robot navigation using visual information. The most popular visual sensors can be conventional pipelines of cameras and RGB-D cameras. However, it is demanding for the performance of image processor because of the high computational cost. For this project, we use an unconventional visual device called the Pixel Processor Array to capture images and process images at the same time. Due to its parallel feature of processing, the image processing frame rate can be over 1000 on the Pixel Processor Array and this no need to utilise another high-performance computer or GPU. Moreover, an agile response to the environment is needed during navigation to deal with unexpected issues. Hence, we want to explore the possibility of agile navigation for mobile robots using this visual device.

About me:

I am currently a PhD student at Bristol Robotics Lab and Visual Information Lab, University of Bristol under the supervision of Prof. Walterio Mayol-Cuevas and Dr. Laurie Bose. My main interests lie in the combination of machine vision and robot control to enable mobile robots to navigate autonomously. I got my Bachelor and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Shandong University supervised by Prof. Chengrui Zhang. I previously worked as a Research Assistant in Shandong University and Robot R&D Intern in ABB Shanghai focusing on visual-guided robot sorting system.

Publications:

Please see my publications in my Google Scholar.

Website:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanan-liu-608b3190/?originalSubdomain=uk