Ideas for a master thesis

[Robotoman]

Dear robotics society.

I'm looking for a good master thesis. I'm a student in Artificial Intelligence, so the research must be approached from a higher level (Machine Learning/AI). The craziest idea about object recognition/detection, learning from demonstration/observation or reinforcement learning/reinforcement learning is welcome.

Thanks for reading this.

[Robotoman]

***bump***
Anyone?

[jwatte]

Build a rolling robot that can navigate through a crowd from point A to point B without bumping into people.

The input could be a known floor plan for the area, and the starting position and ending positions. The robot then does localization relative to the map, and detects people as dynamic obstacles and avoids them or waits until they pass.

This is not a robustly solved problem with good implementations, although there's good resource you can use to guide you. If you can contribute a robust implementation of this kind of behavior to some existing project (ROS or whatever) then that'd be of real value to the world.

[Robotoman]

Build a rolling robot that can navigate through a crowd from point A to point B without bumping into people.

The input could be a known floor plan for the area, and the starting position and ending positions. The robot then does localization relative to the map, and detects people as dynamic obstacles and avoids them or waits until they pass.

This is not a robustly solved problem with good implementations, although there's good resource you can use to guide you. If you can contribute a robust implementation of this kind of behavior to some existing project (ROS or whatever) then that'd be of real value to the world.

I like that idea, more ideas like these are welcome!
And it doesn't have to be practical. It may be focussed more on research itself too. Remember that I am a computer science student (AI), not a mechanical engineer.

[jwatte]

The mechanical part of rolling through a shopping mall is a well solved mechanical engineering problem. You can buy an electric wheelchair, or a radio-controlled car, or some simple rolling rover chassis, to get you going without needing to do any mechanical engineering yourself.