GeckoSystems Intl. Corp. (PINKSHEETS: GCKO) (http://www.geckosystems.com/) -- announced today that during their first annual "Mobile Robots in Motion" conference November 4-5, 2009 attendees will be able to observe and discuss GeckoSystems' sensor fusion based vision system, the CompoundSensorArray™. GeckoSystems is a dynamic leader in the emerging mobile robotics industry revolutionizing their development and usage with "Mobile Robot Solutions for Safety, Security and Service™."
"Traditional video centric machine vision is very expensive in dollars, power consumed, and time required to update. Taking a clue from compound insect eyes in nature, we invented the CompoundedSensorArray (CSA) which 'creates' two hundred and sixty facets (like a compound insect eye) by scanning ten infrared range (IR) finders over twenty-six positions every 1-1.5 seconds. We fuse this 180 degree Field of View (FOV) with sonar range finders to give greater range and reliability to the CSA for locating stationary and/or dynamic obstacles quickly and at low cost, both in dollars and time," observed Martin Spencer, President/CEO, GeckoSystems.
The CSA system also includes a high speed stepping motor, its control electronics, and the software to correctly assemble the facets' ranging data into an abstracted image for use by their automatic, self-navigation software, GeckoNav™.
"The amount of data that the CompoundSensorArray provides is far greater then what can reasonably be collected with fixed sensors and much lower cost then scanning laser range finding systems frequently used," stated Mark Peele, Vice President, Research and Development, GeckoSystems.
"This low cost, sensor fusion system not only provides the critical, actionable situation awareness information sufficient for our AI navigation software, GeckoNav, but also satisfies these requirements at a lower cost, in both dollars and power. This reduces the CareBot's cost to the end user while maintaining high level utility and increased ROI to our stockholders," concluded Spencer.
According to Wikipedia: "Sensor fusion is the combining of sensory data or data derived from sensory data from disparate sources such that the resulting information is in some sense better than would be possible when these sources were used individually."
Everyday we use "sensor fusion" in our routine activities. For example, we smell smoke and then look for a grayish cloud to determine the source of the smoke, its proximity, and consequent degree of danger to us. In noisy crowds when we talk with someone, we use lip reading to enable us to understand what we don't hear clearly. Humans use sensor fusion every day to make choices based on data that is interdependent, or incomplete, versus using only one of our five senses. The better the sensor fusion, the better the choices and the more "actionable" the "situation awareness" is.