The structural design of power transmission lines requires knowledge from a variety of widely-dispersed expert sources. This thesis demonstrates how an expert system can be efficiently used to assemble and organize this knowledge in order to design a wide range…

Passively accepting measurements of the world is not enough, as the data obtained is always incomplete, and the inferences made from it uncertain to a degree which is often unacceptable. Machines that operate autonomously will always be faced with this…

This thesis describes an algorithm for detecting moving objects in images taken from a moving robot. The algorithm distinguishes itself from other similar, existing solutions in that it lends itself to a fast implementation, yet provides results which are reliable…

An object recognition system called ORB1 is proposed and implemented for use on a mobile robot. ORB utilizes the QUADRIS sensor platform developed at the Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM) at McGill University, which is composed of two BIRIS2 laser…

New digital communication applications, such as multimedia, require very powerful error correcting codes that deliver low error rates while operating at low to moderate ratios (SNRs). Turbo codes have reasonable complexity and can achieve very low error rates if a…

In this thesis, we present two new methods to overcome the effects of both camera calibration errors and partial emptiness of surface voxels in voxel-coloring. Voxel-coloring is a relatively new volumetric method for 3D scene reconstruction from multiple calibrated views.…