Learning Multi-Modal Navigation for Unmanned Ground Vehicles
GHC 6501Abstract: A robot that operates efficiently in a team with a human in an unstructured outdoor environment must be able to translate commands from a modality that is intuitive to its operator into actions. This capability is especially important as robots become ubiquitous and interact with untrained users. For this to happen, the robot must [...]
In-Field Robotic Leaf Grasping and Automated Crop Spectroscopy
NSH 1305Agricultural robotics is a growing field of intelligent automation that is proving to drastically increase the speed and reliability of in-field tasks such as precision seed planting, harvesting, field mapping, and crop monitoring. More specifically, plant breeders are beginning to use robotic systems to record the physical traits of crops throughout the growing season at [...]
Soft-matter Artificial Muscle by Electrochemical Surface Oxidation of Liquid Metal
Scaife Hall 224Natural muscles, a result of more than 500 millions years of evolution, are elegant machines that generate force and motion electrochemically. The brief history of robotics does not have the luxury of millions of years to reverse-engineer many aspects of life. The development of artificial muscles therefore seeks to build more muscle-like actuators for robots. [...]
Radiation Source Localization using a Gamma-ray Camera
GHC 6501Radiation source localization is a common and critical task across applications such as nuclear facility decommissioning, radioactive disaster response, and security. Traditional count-based sensors (e.g. Geiger counters) infer range to the source based on the observed number of gamma photons, expected source strength, and assumed intermediate attenuation from the environment. In cluttered 3D settings, such [...]