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March 2009 Calendar

CS Masters' Thesis Defense

Title: An Adaptive Streaming Video Infrastructure for a Wireless iRobot Create Platform
Speaker: Sudha Natarajan
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: GMCS 408
Thesis advisor: Dr Marko Vuskovic

Abstract:
This research focuses on an efficient way to wirelessly stream video from an autonomous iRobot Create development vehicle to a mobile user. All control communication between the mobile user and the vehicle will be performed with a web browser using asynchronous JavaScript to transmit and receive SOAP messages. A real-time video stream will be efficiently encoded and transmitted from the vehicle over an 802.11 WLAN and displayed in a mobile user's browser. Using the SOAP protocol, the mobile user will be able to send messages to the vehicle to remotely view a miniature Fire-I camera mounted in the vehicle's shell. The purpose of the vehicle will be to autonomously roam a designated flat area such as a public parking lot, port, international border crossing, or airport to detect the presence of hazardous material or contraband. Users will be able to remotely control any of severally deployed iRobots using a standard web browser running on a laptop with a wireless interface. The iRobot vehicle is short enough to pass under an automobile. One key purpose of this work is to provide the necessary software infrastructure to automatically scan a vehicle from underneath to look for hidden contraband. In this work we have developed a novel video encoding scheme to efficiently transmit video frames to a remote browser. Based on link quality and signal strength, the iRobot will adaptively modify the number of frames transmitted per second and the quality of a transmitted frame to reduce packet loss.
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