ECE Associate Professor Sanjeev Koppal was recently notified of his selection as an Amazon Scholar. Amazon’s Scholars Program is specifically designed for academics from universities around the globe who want to work on large-scale technical challenges while continuing to teach and conduct research at their universities. This honor will support Dr. Koppal’s research efforts in the areas of computer vision and robotics.

Dr. Koppal has been working at the University of Florida since 2014 on problems at the intersection of computer and robot vision algorithms and optical and camera hardware. His focus has been on novel cameras and applications for autonomous vehicles and UAVs, such as depth sensing and tracking. Because his cameras involve tight coupling between algorithm and hardware, the cameras can perform extremely efficiently due to the advantages in size, power, cost, and computation. It was work in this area which ultimately led to Dr. Koppal’s receipt in 2020 of an NSF CAREER Award for his project, “Fast Foveation: Bringing Active Vision into the Camera.”

At Amazon Robotics, more than a half-million real robots interact with packages that are delivered to customers all over the world. Almost all of these robots rely on cameras and sensors to do their job effectively. Dr. Koppal is working with Amazon to create better cameras and better algorithms for these robots.

“When I visited the Amazon Robotics facility,” says Dr. Koppal, “I was blown away by the sheer scale of everything and the fact that there are so many real robots working in concert with humans to deliver what the customers need. It was almost like something out of a sci-fi movie.”