History of the Autonomous Agents Lab
The autonomous agents lab has had a number of homes through its history.
We started out in incredibly cramped space on the fifth floor of Machray Hall (one office that was widened to two by removing a wall). As the number of students grew and the size of the projects we worked on demanded more floor space, we quickly outgrew this facility.
The department as a whole was cramped for space, and Physics kindly lent us space in a sub-basement whose previous incarnation was a control room for a cyclotron. This space became our satellite operation, which we affectionately referred to as the Dungeon. A number of generations of RoboCup teams were developed there.
With the construction of the new building, the lab found its current home, and we have a new space about equal to the combined older lab facilities. This is the facility we operate from today.
A Map showing the the location of the laboratory on campus is available.
Mixed Reality PacMan
As part of COMP 4060, our students just finished implementing a Mixed Reality Pac Man application using the mixed reality platform we have developed.
The robots are 2" infrared toy tanks, running on a 40" lcd and controlling the action of the game characters in the virtual world of Pac Man. Vision is provided by Ergo. Video of this and other mixed-reality applications are in the Comp 4060 video directory, a paper on this approach is in the publications section for 2007, and previous papers describe Ergo. Ergo is also downloadable from this website.
The Autonomous Agents Lab on Canada AM
While at RoboCup in Bremen, we were contacted by CTV's Canada AM to put in an appearance on the show. They hade a hard time arranging studio space in Bremen, because the World Cup and RoboCup events were taking up much of the local media pool. After a few days bouncing emails and phone calls back and forth, we managed to negotiate a time between events to go to a local studio to appear live. When we got there, they only had room for one person at the desk-in-front-of-the-blue screen, and Shane was elected. Pictures and some video of the event are here.
The original broadcast is viewable on the CTV streaming video server.