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Schedule for this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, November 9, 1998
Most people, when discussing robotics, focus on progress made in the latter part of the 20th Century. However, mankind has been dreaming up robots since before recorded history. In this talk I will discuss such early robotic creations -- "early automata" -- drawing on sources from mythology, legend, and history up through the Renaissance. Such topics include Egyptian and Greek clepsydra (water clocks), Roger Bacon's mechanical engines, and ingenious mechanical devices developed in the 12th Century by Al-Razzaz. I will also discuss how man's view of building such devices has changed, or not changed, over time.
Charles J. Cohen is the Research Director at Cybernet Systems Corporation, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dr. Cohen is the project manager of the Cybernet Systems effort to develop a real-time optical pose determination system for the United States Air Force. He is also the principal investigator on a project to process real-time video from numerous vehicular-mounted cameras for autonomous location derivation. Additionally, he is the manager for a Cybernet Systems project to develop a dynamic system based gesture recognition system, an effort supported by the Army, Air Force, and NASA. Dr. Cohen's current research interests are in gesture recognition, estimation theory, system integration, visual communications, machine vision, and perceptually coupled systems. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University in 1989. During this time he worked at the National Security Agency for 18 months. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering Systems from the University of Michigan in 1992 and 1996. Dr. Cohen is also known in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval research club, as Midair MacCormaic. Midair is at times a jester, squire, and pilgrim who travels throughout Europe in search of these wonderful mechanical devices
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Brent Warner
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