Chi Thai

Retired UGA Faculty/Staff
mvteachr@uga.edu

Dr. Chi Thai is an Associate Professor in the College of Engineering at UGA. He teaches the FYOS “Exploring Robotics” course to freshmen and “Embedded Robotics” course to engineering students. He also teaches introductory robotics to middle and high school students via the Duke TIP and Summer Academy programs.  His research areas include spectroscopy and stereo machine vision in applications to plant health detection and precision farming, and also in embedded robotics applications for theatrical environments.  He is developing an Agricultural Robotics project with 2 objectives HealthScan (real-time field scanning and map making of plant canopies health status) and PestScan (real-time scanning and storing of images of plant pests dislodged from plant canopies). In Theatre Robotics, his research goal is to remove the “human operator” from the interactions loop between a human actor and a humanoid robot with the following sub-goals:

1. capture and characterization of human actor meaningful gestures
2. develop a “Character Engine” (young/old, happy/sad) at the servo motors control level for humanoid robots.
3. develop a Theatre Planner/Learner tool using production systems tools such as CLIPS or SOAR and Hidden Markov Models.
4. develop a “human spectator” assessment tool using Clickers technology.