A fundamental problem that arises in realizing large-scale wireless networks of mobile robots is that of controlling the communication topology. This thesis makes three contributions to the area of mobilitybased topology control in robot networks. First, this work proposes local, geometric conditions on robot positions that guarantee global network connectivity. When combined with distributed c...

Several classifiers for forward looking infra-red imagery are designed and implemented, and their relative performance is benchmarked on 2545 images belonging to 8 different ship classes, from which 11 attributes are extracted. These are a Bayes classifier, a Dempster–Shafer classifier ensemble in which specialized classifiers are optimized to return a single ship class, a k-nearest neighbor cl...

Most machine learning algorithms are lazy: they extract from the training set the minimum information needed to predict its labels. Unfortunately, this often leads to models that are not robust when features are removed or obscured in future test data. For example, a backprop net trained to steer a car typically learns to recognize the edges of the road, but does not learn to recognize other fe...

The goal of the GecGo middleware is to provide all the services required by self-organizing distributed applications running on multihop ad-hoc networks. Because of the frequent as well as unreliable and anonymous communication between accidental neighbors observed in these networks, applications have to adapt continuously to changes in the mobile environment and the GecGo middleware offers the...

Over the last few years the authors have been involved in research aimed at developing a machine vision system for locating and identifying surface defects on materials. The particular problem being studied involves locating surface defects on hardwood lumber in a species independent manner. Obviously, the accurate location and identification of defects is of paramount importance in this system...