Daniel Casner, formerly a systems engineer at Anki, presents the "Selecting and Exploiting Sensors for Sensor Fusion in Consumer Robots" tutorial at the May 2019 Embedded Vision Summit.
How do you design robots that are aware of their unstructured environments at a consumer price point? Excellent sensing is required but using low cost sensors is also necessary. By fusing data from multiple sensors and making sure every sensor does multiple jobs (like the hidden sensors in your camera ISP), we can achieve rolling shutter correction, drivable space understanding and other applications. Careful sensor selection with a focus on ultimate customer utility, data bus architecture with a plan for fusion, and full understanding of the inner workings of each sensor can make all these fusion tasks easier and reduces computational complexity.
This talk covers the pragmatic approach used for hardware design and some of the design choices to enable sensor fusion made across multiple generations of products. Casner also gives an overview of how information is fused from multiple sensors in order to make robots that feel alive and aware of their surroundings.
