Illah Nourbakhsh’s Gigapan Machine

By Ayub Khan, MMNS

Carnegie Mellon’s Prof.Ilah Nourbaksh is the developer of the innovative Gigapan camera system. The gigapan is a robotic platform for capturing very high resolution panoramic images from a standard digital camera.

Nourbaksh received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, electric wheel­chair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion.

His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, soft­ware reuse, interleaving planning and execution, and planning and scheduling algorithms. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millennium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc., recently acquired by Witness Systems. Illah co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.

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