ATLANTA — As part of the Department of Defense grant awarded to Georgia State University’s Department of Computer Science titled “Building an AI Laboratory at GSU for Research, Education and Outreach”, GSU successfully acquired Spot from Boston Dynamics.
Associate Professor (Computer Science), Dr. Jonathan Shihao Ji, serves as PI, with Associate Professor (Computer Science), Dr. Michael Weeks, Professor and Associate Chair Department of Computer Science, Dr. Raj Sunderraman, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science, Dr. Armin Mikler serving as Co-PIs.
For the project, the team is building the first AI and Robotics laboratory at GSU for research, education and outreach. For the research, the team plans to utilize the capabilities enabled by Spot for search and rescue, facilities maintenance, emergence responses, etc., where it’s unsafe to deploy human investigators for tasking due to unfriendly, hazardous or even hostile environments.
Spot can be equipped with different payloads that serves different functions including SPOT CAM+ which provides a detailed visual inspections using a color ring camera with a 360° field of view and a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) color camera with 30x optical zoom); SPOT CAM+IR adds a thermal camera to the Spot CAM+ to enable detailed thermal and visual inspections and Spot CORE I/O enhances both the computation and communications available on the Spot platform. Connect sensors, cameras, and other devices to Spot, process the data collected into actionable insights, and relay those insights over 5G/LTE. Based on Spots foundation code provided by Boston Dynamic, GSU’s research will go to implementing programming to code specific functions that will allow different actions for Spot.
Spot previously had his debut at GSU Student Center during the IEEE PerCom’23 conference. [See Details].