PSU Magazine Spring 1993

Perkowski in his office in the Portland Center for Advanced Technology on a robotic wheelchair equipped with voice control, a computer and a sonar .mechanism that the two hope will help blind quadriplegics maneuver. People with muscular problems who have dif– ficulty controlling joysticks could also benefit. "You'll sit in the chair and say, 'Go to room number such-and-such,' and it'll go there," Stanton says. The com– puter will contain a series of maps of, for example, the campus buildings, which it will compare with the real– time information provided by the sonar to navigate from place to place. At present the prototype has no room for an actual person. It's a wheel– chair with a personal computer sitting across the armrests. It also sports a five– foot mast topped with a circular sonar emitter. "When we get another grant from a foundation, we can buy a laptop computer," Perkowski says wryly. 20PSU So far the device can turn itself in a circle, but it has trouble distinguishing between the walls and other objects, like people or potted plants, if they're too close to the perimeter of the room. Eventually, Stanton says, the chair will be equipped with wheel sensors to en– hance "collision avoidance." This is just the sort of thing Perkowski revels in and that he inspires in his students: the rigorous, pains– taking real-world problem solving that is the engineer's special preoccupation. Perkowski's academic interests come naturally. His grandfather, a mathe– matician, and his father, an environ– mental engineer, were both on the faculty of his alma mater, the Techni– cal University of Warsaw. An uncle is a mechanical engineer. Perkowski received his doctorate in computer science, known in Poland as automat– ics, in 1980. Electrical engineering exerted a strong magnetism fairly early in his life. "When I was 12 or 13 I decided to be a physicist," he says. "But then I found electronics is more interesting. In physics you just try to understand the world. I wanted to build things." One of his early projects was build– ing a transistor radio at age 13---only a year after the first example had arrived in Poland. As a teenager, Perkowski became fascinated with the works of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, read all his books and eventually corresponded with him. Lem, also a philosopher of science, is known for his fusion of solid scientific understanding with folktale-like story lines and an obsession with the consequences of chance actions. Perkowski credits his relationship with the author with providing added inspiration to follow his career path. Perkowski's image processing work has found at least two medical applica– tions. Using a system called OVULO– COMPUTER, he has developed a method for determining ovulation cycles in women. Perkowski says he devised the system because he was interested in finding a birth contr9l