MAVERic is a versatile robotic vision head developed for oculo-motor research at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute's Laboratory for Mathematical Neuroscience, in collaboration with the University of Southern California's Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab. The hardware was built by SARCOS. It has 7 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) - pan and tilt in each eye and head rotate, nod and tilt - and is controlled using a real time operating system (vxWorks). MAVERic is equipped with multiple sensory modalities including position sensing (7DOFs), load sensing (3DOFs), dual microphones,foveal and peripheral vision in each eye and a 6-axis gyroscope in addition to laser range finders in each eye. Project Goals The main emphasis of the project revolves around exploring principled frameworks for mulitmodal sensor and cue integration while incorporating the constraints imposed by the complete sensory-motor loop. Example projects include real-time auditory source localization, online reinforcement learning using stochastic gradient techniques for task learning, real-time learning of oculomotor behaviors (VOR, OKR, smooth pursuit), multi-modal visual attention, cue/state prediction and inference based on Particle Filters etc. The hardware components of this head prototype form a realistic model of a human head, hence, lending it ideal as a testbed for the development of online vision, audition, and learning algorithms. Contact Project Leader: Contact in Japan: Webmaster: Sethu Vijayakumar, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor University of Southern California sethu@usc.edu Masato Inoue, M.D. Lab for Mathematical Neuroscience RIKEN Brain Science Institute minoue@mns.brain.riken.go.jp Aaron D'Souza Graduate Research Assistant University of Southern California adsouza@usc.edu Note: This site requires cascading style sheet (.css) compatible browsers in order to be viewed properly (Netscape 6.0 or IE 5.0 and higher) New!! We will demonstrate the various project implementations on MAVERic at the NIPS2002 conference. [Local Resources]