Jill Crisman
Assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Northeastern University

Jill Crisman is researching biologically based robotic systems as well as computer vision techniques for intelligent robotics. She is working with a biologist to understand how a lobster's central nervous system controls walking, and then implementing this control strategy in an ambulatory robot. They have simulated the central pattern generator, and the command and coordination systems that generate muscle control signals for stable walking gaits.

A second project, building a user interface to a robot wheelchair, involves computer vision and intelligent control. The user would point to a location on a video screen and issue a command such as ``go there'' or ``track that.'' The robot would then go to the location or follow the target while avoiding obstacles along the way. Crisman plans to extend this interface to control manipulation tasks as well.

Crisman's doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University dealt with a computer vision system that could detect roads for a robot van. Her system could track difficult roads that had potholes and degraded road edges but no lane markings. CMU's Navlab robot (see IEEE Expert, Aug. 1991, pp. 31-52) successfully drove on many of these roads in a variety of weather conditions using Crisman's computer vision system.

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