Michael Jenkin

Gregory Dudek

The AQUA research project is a collaborative venture between three Canadian universities: McGill University (Montreal) and York University. Prior project work has included Dalhousie University (Halifax).

The AQUA team is made up of the following people:

• Investigators (professors)

  The project investigators for Aqua are Gregory Dudek and Michael Jenkin. Past participants have included Donald Kramer and Evangelos Milios who were part of an NSERC-funded Strategic Grant. Gregory is Director of the McGill School of Computer Science and runs the McGill University Mobile Robotics Lab. Michael runs the VGR lab at York University. Don is a biologist with extensive experience in marine environments. Evangelos is on faculty at Dalhousie University.

• 

  Project Staff

  Chris Prahacs is a research scientist at McGill and was responsible for much of the design and construction of the robot.

• External Advisors

  Ioannis Rekleitis is a robotics specialist from the Canadian Space Agency.

  Michelle Theberge, a marine biologist, specializes in reef monitoring.

• Additonal Field Trials Participants (graduate students)

  Junaed Sattar (visual servoing, visual navigation and visual human-robot interaction), from McGill University.
  Philippe Giguere (environment identification and gait characterization ), from McGill University.
  Dimitri Marinakis, from McGill University.
  Many other students are involved.

• Project Alumni and Past Participants

  Jim Zacher is a research associate at the Centre for Vision Research at York University and was involved in the development and deployment of the York underwater stereo/inertial sensor.

  Paul DiMarco (McGill, depth inference), from McGill University.
  Pifu Zhang (acoustic localization), from Dalhousie University

  Andrew Hogue (trinocular rig development, psychophysics, VR design), from York University.
  Andrew German (York underwater stereo/inertial sensor), from York University.
  

All the faculty and staff involved have a substantial background in robotics, machine intelligence, and/or computer vision. Most of the graduate students involved have also working on other robot systems or vision projects. Dudek, Jenkin and Milios have been collaborating with one another on robotics problems since 1990 on theoretical results as well as on the ARK robot, a climbing robot, and various computer vision projects.

Martin Buehler was on faculty at McGill, and was pivotal in the development of RHex on which the AQUA robot is based. Chris Prahacs was key to the development of the AQUA vehicle and was involved in RHex before that.