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I always think of Louis bent over, under a floor lamp, at the dining room table wherever he happened to be, with a pad of lined paper, working on the latest draft of a paper or a proposal or a diagram. This is an aspect of his personality probably not unknown to many of you.
For an appreciation of the significance of these writings, however, we can now turn to NASA's website for the Multimission Image Processing Lab (MIPL) http://www-mipl.jpl.nasa.gov/, a lab which sprang out of the early work by Louis and many others like him (both at MIT's Instrumentation Lab and CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and has resulted so far in the myriad images sent back by Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Rovers, and in the success of these rovers in avoiding navigational hazards in their peregrinations.
Louis was not one to be daunted by immediate realities, scientific or topological, and in this case reality has apparently caught up with his vision. Although printed circuitry methods and powerful computational algorithms have, of course, vastly improved upon early imagery filters, the central concept of stereoscopic or binocular vision championed by Louis has withstood the test of time.
I have included some scans of notes, text, and a diagram from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Instrumentation Laboratory Publication R-582 Rev I Assembly of Computers to Command and Control a Robot by Louis Sutro and William L. Kilmer, February 1969 (Revised December 1969). |