CMU Essay: Interests

Choosing a primary interest of research at CMU is like trying to choose what to eat a fine restaurant. You know that anything and everything will be delicious. Even the food you don't like will be delicious.

I really liked the multi-robot research. I think that will be the future of space exploration. Instead of a singular billion dollar machine. Send 1,000 machines or 10,000 machines. Then let them be automated and let them determine the most efficient way to map a location, to check the composition of the soil, and to get the needed experimental results.

What I'm curious about is how do you allow the system to account for partially disabled robots? How do you account for robots with different equipment sets and different abilities. Especially if those abilities overlap in some manner.

A less robotic interest is an adaptive system where default behavior is altered based on time of day, day of week, and calender day. This would be cross referenced with historical data. An example would be a stop light that learns to favor east bound traffic in the morning, west bound traffic in the evening, and north south traffic when a special event is detected. In theory this light would continue to adapt it's timing as it's environment changed.