Engineering Memory of the Month

When robots roam the halls

Twenty years and two months ago one might have seen an object matching this description rolling down the corridors of Cedar Hall: “The robot is essentially cylindrical with a diameter of 65 cm and a height of 170 cm. the Wheels, forming the edges of an equilateral triangle, have six controlled passive rollers along their chords, allowing the wheel to move sideways while driven”.

The robot’s given name was Mobile Autonomous Robot Stanford (MARS) but everyone knew it as Mobi, a robot remarkable not only for its lateral movement, but for being able to explore buildings using stereo vision and ultrasonics (sound). The robot would look for the vertical edges of objects (perpendicular to the horizon) and reason about them. It would then navigate through the doorways and around the objects it inferred. It had an onboard computer as well as a wireless link to an offboard server. The project was led by Professor Thomas Binford and then students Ernst Triendl and David J. Kriegman.

On Oct. 18, 2006, Triendl and Kriegman ordered Mobi on a 35 meter trek around the building in which it successfully went through a doorway, moved around a pillar, avoided a water fountain and succeeded in not smashing through windows. “Sadly the run ended because of a communication failure between the [server] and the robot permitting the researchers and onlookers to retire for the evening after celebrating over champagne’” the pair wrote in a 1987 paper.

Today Mobi is on display on the first floor of the Gates Computer Science Building, where the above photo was taken.

Gather your memorable photos from your school days and take them to the scanner. Then e-mail them to David Orenstein, communications and PR manager, for possible posting.