MSR Thesis Talk: Haidar Jamal
ZoomTitle: Localization for Lunar Micro-Rovers Abstract: This talk presents an avionics and localization system that enables a lunar micro-rover to navigate autonomously. This system is important for the latest class of small, low-powered, and fast robots going to the Moon in search of polar ice. The first component of the system is an Extended [...]
PoseIt: A Visual-Tactile Dataset of Holding Poses for Grasp Stability Analysis
Abstract: When humans grasp objects in the real world, we often move our arm to hold the object in a different pose where we can use it. In contrast, typical lab settings only study the stability of the grasp immediately after lifting, without any subsequent re-positioning of the arm. However, an object’s stability could vary [...]
Planning to Minimize Human and Robot Efforts Over Tasks
Abstract: It is not feasible to pre-program robots a priori for every possible task they may encounter in unstructured domains. Upon encountering a task that a robot can't solve, one common strategy is to teach it new skills via demonstrations. However, demonstrating a task can often be more cumbersome than performing the task directly. This [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Akash Sharma
Title: Incorporating Semantic Structure in SLAM Abstract: For robots to understand the environment they interact with, a combination of geometric information and semantic information is imperative. In this talk, I propose a fast and scalable Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that represents indoor scenes as a graph of semantic objects. Leveraging the observation that [...]