Marshall U Team Works on Computer Vision Navigation

  • By Paul McCloskey
  • 08/13/07
Three Marshall University computer science students and faculty are working on a project to build a sensor suite for the United States Navy to be used on autonomous marine vehicles.

The work is being done under a $2.7 million contract from the Navy with Spatial Integrated Systems of Rockville, MD. Marshall University is a subcontractor on the project, according to a report in the Huntington, WV Herald Dispatch.

The goal of the Autonomous Maritime Navigation (AMN) project is to develop integrated hardware and software to enable ships to autonomously navigate in waterways.

The solution requires software-based data fusion from an array of sensors, including sonar, radar, GPS, and digital cameras, according to Venkat Gudivada, a professor of computer science at Marshall University's Huntington, WV campus.

The team is focusing on ways to generate 3D reference points using stereo vision to estimate the distance of obstacles ,such as ocean vehicles and coastlines. The resulting system would constitute a form of computer vision that would enable a marine vehicle to steer itself clear, according to the  researchers.

The three Marshall professors involved in the project are Gudivada; Joe Fuller, a professor of computer science; and Peter Saveliev, an associate professor of mathematics. The three Marshall computer science students on the project are Camden Clutter of Clarksburg, WV, Shawn Cotton of Huntington, and Brad Fitzwater of Eleanor, WV.

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About the Author

Paul McCloskey is contributing editor of Syllabus.

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