I’m currently the Project Leader of DAvinCi – Distributed Agents with Collective Intelligence. We are developing a hardware/software framework to enable handicapped robots to gain similar knowledge of the environment as the better equipped ones.
DAvinCi has so far successfully guided a ‘blind’ robot with no on-board navigation through a cluttered environment with the help of a map pre-built using a second robot. Details of the experiment can be found in the poster we presented at the A*STAR Science Conference.
Here’s a video of our first proof-of-concept experiment showcasing a Pioneer robot equipped with a Camera and LIDAR mapping the environment and the DAvinCi server uses this information to guide a ‘blind’ Roomba to the red spots.
The framework has been explained in greater detail in our paper presented to ICRA 2010. It can be found here.