Howard Gordon, RIP

I was saddened to hear of the death of Howard Gordon of Surveyor Corporation with whom I worked quite extensively over the last year or two on the Surveyor SVS. A quick search shows up about a thousand email correspondences with him in the last 12 months. Howard was clearly very talented, knowledgeable on software and electronics, enthusiastic about robotics and always helpful in resolving bugs or suggesting changes.



I don't know how much I should divulge, because presumably Surveyor Corporation will continue, but the last I heard at the beginning of this year he was working on some interesting stuff relating to navigation of robots in a home or office environment. By the beginning of 2010 I'd developed the firmware stereo algorithms about as far as they were likely to go, given the CPU and memory constraints of the Blackfin DSPs, and had done some experiments with occupancy grid mapping and visual odometry using the SVS. These early mapping experiments were purely open loop, since the surveyor robot I was using didn't have closed loop speed control, and so suffered from the gradual drift which all such systems encounter. However, towards the end of 2009 Howard was developing a new system which would have an accelerometer for inertial sensing, encoders for closed loop motor control and GPS for use outdoors. I was optimistic that combining the vision system with this additional sensing could yield a pretty good navigation capability at a cost in the order of a few hundred dollars.