Autonomous and Interactive Systems at UC Merced has broad applications and focuses on the extremely important capability that intelligent systems have to achieve in order to be inserted in society: the ability to autonomously act with, and/or in cooperation with, people. The projects focus on systems that can be used to train and assist people in preparation for or during complex and difficult situations. With the word systems we target a broad class of artifacts, like mobile robots, digital virtual characters, and embedded systems, just to name a few. These systems can operate in various ways. They can be fully autonomous, remotely operated, or receive sporadic control actions from human beings. Their design can also vary considerably. They can be programmed by composing carefully engineered simple functionalities, or they can be taught high level concepts that they later on reuse and generalize in various contexts. All these topics concern the development of new methods and algorithms for achieving truly Autonomous and Interactive Systems.

2009 Update:

The main goal of this project is to establish a center to study interactive robotics and virtual systems at UC Merced. Thanks to a recent MRI award obtained from the National Science Foundation the center is slated to be completed in Fall 2009, and it includes state of the art humanoid robots and motion capture instrumentation. The School of Engineering at UC Merced has also provided excellent support to this project by assigning a room to be used exclusively for its development. This room is currently being prepared with the received instrumentation and will serve as a key demonstration place of the research projects being developed by this center.

The center being formed is most probably the first one of its type in the California Central Valley, and will therefore be able to offer new high-end research and educational opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students of the region and beyond.

Interactive systems are programmed to purposefully respond to a wide spectrum of user actions. They may be fully or partially autonomous, virtual or embodied. Possible applications targeted at UC Merced include entertainment, education, training, robot assisted urban search and rescue, assisted living, and intelligent manufacturing. The rapidly changing demographic landscape in the US stems a variety of problems that can be tackled by using the kind of involved technology. In spite of growing demand for this type of applications there is a projected shortage of specialists prepared to design and operate these systems. The established center tackles this problem by focusing on research problems which combine research on autonomous systems and user interaction in a combined fashion. The center will also expose students to top notch technology appropriate to solve these pressing societal needs.