Event Location: NSH 1109
Bio: Dr. Burridge is a world-recognized robotics expert with over a dozen publications in prestigious international robotics conferences and journals. His doctoral thesis, which was chaired by Professor Daniel Koditschek, described a formal method for generating stable mode-switching robot control laws. In 2002, Dr. Burridge became a Senior Research Scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology in the Mobile Robot Laboratory, working with Professor Ron Arkin. In this position, he was involved in three DARPA projects and helped manage the technical direction of about twenty students, both undergraduate and graduate. One of these projects involved the development of a user interface for a team of autonomous robots. In 2003, he joined the R&D department of DVT Corporation – a small business in Atlanta producing camera systems for machine vision. In 2005, Dr. Burridge returned to Metrica to continue providing robotics expertise to JSC in the Robonaut group. He was Robonaut’s lead for the Peer-to-Peer project led by NASA ARC, which sought to improve human-robot teamwork. Currently, he is the autonomy lead for the “Centaur” – Robonaut mounted on a 4-wheeled outdoor rover.

Abstract: The Predictive Interactive Graphical Interface (PIGI) is a suite of tools developed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) for supervising robots across expected Earth-moon time delays (5-10 second round trip). These tools improve interaction between a human supervisor and a remote robot by mitigating the effects of the time delay. Using a combination of robot behavior prediction and task queuing, PIGI enables the supervisor to reduce robot idle time, which leads to more efficient completion of the tasks. PIGI was used in 2007 and 2008 to remotely command five different NASA robots in Arizona, California, Texas, and Washington, all from a single location at JSC in Houston.