Field Robotics Center Seminar
Symbiotic Planning for Planetary Exploration
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Joseph Amato is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University co-advised by Profs. William "Red" Whittaker and David Wettergreen. He received his B.S. in Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2012 and spent two years working for Army Operational Test Command at Ft Hood, Texas, before [...]
Fuel-Optimal Spacecraft Guidance for Landing in Planetary Pits
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Neal Bhasin is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by Prof. Red Whittaker. Neal received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 2015 and has done research in the Planetary Robotics Lab since 2012. He served as team leader on the NASA funded instrument project "Flyover [...]
Acoustic Structure from Motion
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Tiffany Huang is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Prof. Michael Kaess. She received her B.S. with honors in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2014. Her current research focuses on perception and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms for autonomous [...]
Long-range GPS-denied Aerial Inertial Navigation
Event Location: GHC 4405Bio: Garrett Hemann received his bachelors in Aerospace Engineering from MIT in 2011. During that time, he worked in CSAIL under Nick Roy working on control for indoor UAVs. After graduation, he worked at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab for 3 years. There he worked on control and multirobot coordination of monocopters, [...]
High-Fidelity Planetary Route Determination Using Computationally Efficient Monocular Fisheye Odometry and Sun Compass
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Eugene Fang is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by William “Red” Whittaker. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. His current research focuses on route determination for planetary rovers.Abstract: Today’s planetary robotic exploration is carried out by [...]
Robot Brachiation with Energy Control
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Zongyi Yang is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by David Wettergreen. He received a B.S. in Engineering Science ECE Option from University of Toronto in 2014. His current research focuses on robot brachiation. Abstract: Branching structures are ubiquitous elements in several environments on Earth, from trees found in [...]
Rovers for Exploring Lunar Pits and Caves
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: John Walker completed his aerospace PhD at Tohoku University in 2016. His Mechanical Engineering degree was earned at the University of Alberta in 2005. In 2010 he attended the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. This was followed by an internship at the Space Robotics Lab at Tohoku University in Japan [...]
Navigating Unmanned Aerials Vehicles at Low Altitude: Accuracy, Reliability and Security
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Grace Xingxin Gao is an assistant professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the GPS Laboratory at Stanford University in 2008. Before joining Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in 2012, Prof. Gao was a research [...]
Rover Localization in Sparsely-Featured Environments
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Samuel Yim is an M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by David Wettergreen. He received a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in 2014. His current research focuses on robustly detecting and describing features for SLAM applications.Abstract: Autonomous outdoor localization is a challenging but important task for rovers. This [...]
Convex Interpolation Control with Formal Guarantees for Disturbed and Constrained Nonlinear Systems
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Bastian Schürmann is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Robotics and Embedded Systems at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. There he works in the Cyber-Physical Systems group with Professor Matthias Althoff. His research focuses on obtaining controllers with high performance and formal guarantees for safety-critical systems. This is achieved [...]
Vision-Enhanced Lidar Odometry and Mapping
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Daniel Lu is an MS student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Prof. George Kantor. Daniel received his Bachelor's of Applied Science in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia in 2014. His research currently focuses on perception and pose estimation using a combination of cameras [...]
Visual SLAM with Semantic Scene Understanding
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Shichao Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Sebastian Scherer in the Robotics Institute. He received a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2013. His research focuses on visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) combined with semantic scene [...]
“Ensuring Safe Human-Robot Co-Existence by Reachability Analysis”
Matthias Althoff Technische Universität München Abstract Modern manufacturing companies are expected to quickly and efficiently adapt to production changes, and robotics has long been known as the candidate solution for the required flexibility. To improve such flexibility, future working environments will be populated by both humans and robot manipulators, sharing the same workspace. This scenario [...]
A Fast & Efficient Mission Planner for Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicles in Large, High-resolution Maps of Cluttered Environments
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles have many potential applications, such as monitoring crops and inspecting infrastructure. The potential benefits are greater if the UAV is semi- or fully-autonomous, requiring only occasional human oversight or none at all. This would allow the above use cases to be performed at lower cost, during any time of day, or [...]
Mutual Information for Robust Visual Odometry
Abstract Off-the-shelf digital camera sensors often have limited dynamic range and real-world dynamic lighting changes adversely impact visual state estimation algorithms. This is because most conventional visual state estimation algorithms make the constancy of brightness assumption, wherein the intensity of a pixel is expected to be constant across small motions of a camera. However, this [...]
SLAM and 3D Reconstruction using Imaging Sonar
Abstract Underwater localization and mapping are unusually difficult problems in robotics due to the poor propagation of light through water, which prohibits receiving GPS signals underwater and using cameras to see more than a few meters in turbid water. Due to this, acoustic imaging sonars have been widely used on underwater vehicles as the primary [...]
High-Fidelity Perceptual Representations via Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Models
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Shobhit Srivastava is an M.S. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Nathan Michael. The primary focus of his research is to enable high-fidelity and efficient multimodal environment modeling on mobile autonomous systems to enable efficient inference with respect to the environment. He previously received his [...]
State Estimation and Localization for ROV-Based Reactor Pressure Vessel Inspection Using a Pan-Tilt-Zoom Camera
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Timothy E. Lee is a M.S. in Robotics graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Nathan Michael. Timothy's field robotics research seeks to enable robust, efficient, and autonomous inspection of critical infrastructure. Specifically, he is working towards improving the efficiency of nuclear power by enabling camera-based navigation of underwater [...]
Detecting and Grasping Sorghum Stalks in Outdoor Occluded Environments
Event Location: GHC 6501Bio: Merritt Jenkins is an M.S. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Dr. George Kantor. Merritt's field robotics research focuses on perception and intelligent manipulation of plants in outdoor environments, enabling plant breeders and geneticists to make better-informed breeding decisions. Prior to CMU, Merritt received a B.E. [...]
Adaptive Spectroscopic Exploration Driven by Science Hypotheses for Geologic Mapping
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Alberto Candela Garza is an M.S. in Robotics student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. David Wettergreen. Alberto is affiliated to the Field Robotics Center and is interested in science autonomy for planetary rovers. Prior to CMU, Alberto received a B.S. in Mechatronics Engineering and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering [...]
Software Development for Robotic Systems: some ideas about how to improve it
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Silvio joined the FRC group in 2012 and since then worked with several unmanned ground and aerial vehicles doing a lot of systems integration, testing and performance improvements. Before joining the FRC, he worked for several consumer electronics industries for more than 10 years developing embedded software using both conventional and [...]
Fusion of Cameras and Sparse Ranging Measurements in Multi‐agent SLAM
Abstract Cameras are widely used for localization and navigation in GNSS‐denied environments. By exploiting VSLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) techniques, vehicles equipped with cameras are capable of estimating their own trajectories and simultaneously building a map of the surrounding environment. In many applications, multiple cooperative robotic agents (robotic swarms) are used in order to [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Dense Planar-Inertial SLAM for Large Indoor 3D Reconstruction
Abstract Reconstructing the dense 3D models of indoor environments in real-time is key to many robotics applications, such as navigation, inspection, and augmented reality. It is also a challenging problem due to the accumulation of drift, large amount of data, limited computation, and occasional lack of visual features. We develop an RGB-D simultaneous localization and [...]
Planning Algorithms for Multi-Robot Active Perception
Abstract A fundamental task of robotic systems is to use on-board sensors and perception algorithms to understand high-level semantic properties of an environment. The performance of perception algorithms can be greatly improved by planning the motion of the robots to obtain high-value observations. In this talk I will present a suite of planning algorithms we [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Belief Space Planning for Reducing Terrain Relative Localization Uncertainty in Noisy Elevation Maps
Abstract Accurate global localization is essential for planetary rovers to reach science goals and mitigate mission risk. Planetary robots cannot currently use GPS or infrastructure for navigating, and hence rely on terrain for determining global position. Terrain relative navigation (TRN) compares planetary rover-perspective images and 3D models to existing satellite orbital imagery and digital elevation [...]
From Robust Real-time SLAM to Safe Collision Avoidance
Abstract State estimation plays a critical role in a robotic system. The problem is to know where the robot is and how it is oriented. This is very often a building block in the navigation system, which modules in charge of higher level tasks are relied on. Challenges are to carry out state estimation in [...]
Composable Benchmarks for Safe Motion Planning on Roads
Abstract Numerical experiments for motion planning of road vehicles require numerous components: vehicle dynamics, a road network, static obstacles, dynamic obstacles and their movement over time, goal regions, a cost function, etc. Providing a description of the numerical experiment precise enough to reproduce it might require several pages of information. Thus, only key aspects are [...]
Learning Deep Multimodal Features for Reliable and Comprehensive Scene Understanding
Abstract Robust scene understanding is a critical and essential task for autonomous navigation. This problem is heavily influenced by changing environmental conditions that take place throughout the day and across seasons. In order to learn models that are impervious to these factors, mechanisms that intelligently fuse features from complementary modalities and spectra have to be [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Learning Reactive Flight Control Policies: from LIDAR measurements to Actions
Abstract The end goal of a reactive flight control pipeline is to output control commands based on local sensor inputs. Classical state estimation and control algorithms break down this problem by first estimating the robot’s velocity and then computing a roll and pitch command based on that velocity. However, this approach is not robust in [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Autonomous 3D Reconstruction in Underwater Unstructured Scenes
Abstract Reconstruction of marine structures such as pilings underneath piers presents a plethora of interesting challenges. It is one of those tasks better suited to a robot due to harsh underwater environments. Underwater reconstruction typically involves human operators remotely controlling the robot to predetermined way-points based on some prior knowledge of the location and model [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Wire Detection, Reconstruction, and Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Abstract Thin objects, such as wires and power lines are one of the most challenging obstacles to detect and avoid for UAVs, and are a cause of numerous accidents each year. This thesis makes contributions in three areas of this domain: wire segmentation, reconstruction, and avoidance. Pixelwise wire detection can be framed as a binary [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Toward Invariant Visual Inertial State Estimation using Information Sparsification
Abstract In this work, we address two current challenges in real-time visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems - efficiency and accuracy. To this end, we present a novel approach to tightly couple visual and inertial measurements in a fixed-lag VIO framework using information sparsification. To bound computational complexity, fixed-lag smoothers perform marginalization of variables but consequently deteriorate accuracy and [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Autonomous drone cinematographer: Using artistic principles to create smooth, safe, occlusion-free trajectories for aerial filming
Abstract: Autonomous aerial cinematography has the potential to enable automatic capture of aesthetically pleasing videos without requiring human intervention, empowering individuals with the capability of high-end film studios. Current approaches either only handle off-line trajectory generation, or offer strategies that reason over short time horizons and simplistic representations for obstacles, which result in jerky movement and [...]
Visual SLAM with Semantic Scene understanding
Abstract: Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has been widely used in autonomous robots and virtual reality. It estimates the sensor motion and maps the environment at the same time. The classic sparse feature point map of visual SLAM is limited for many advanced tasks including robot navigation and interactions, which usually require a high-level understanding of [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Toward intuitive human controlled MAVs: motion primitives based teleoperation
Abstract: Humans excel at composing high-level plans that achieve a complex, multimodal objective; however, achieving proficiency in teleoperating multi-rotor aerial vehicles (MAVs) in unstructured environments with stability and safety requires significant skill and training. In this talk, we present human-in-the-loop control of a MAV via teleoperation using motion primitives that addresses these concerns. We show [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Improving Multirotor Trajectory Tracking Performance using Learned Dynamics Models
Abstract: Multirotors and other aerial vehicles have recently seen a surge in popularity, partly due to a rise in industrial applications such as inspection, surveillance, exploration, package delivery, cinematography, and others. Crucial to multirotors' successes in these applications, and enabling their suitability for other applications, is the ability to accurately track trajectories at high speed [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Automatic Real-time Anomaly Detection for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles
Abstract: The recent incidents with Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft have raised concerns about the safety and reliability of autopilots and autonomous operations. There is a growing need for methods to monitor the status of aircraft and report any faults and anomalies to the human pilot or to the autopilot to deal with the emergency [...]
Event Cameras: Image Reconstruction, Convolutions and Color
Abstract: Event cameras are novel, bio-inspired visual sensors, whose pixels output asynchronous and independent timestamped spikes at local intensity changes, called ‘events’. Event cameras offer advantages over conventional frame-based cameras in terms of latency, high dynamic range (HDR) and temporal resolution. Event cameras do not output conventional image frames, thus, image reconstruction from events enables [...]
From Farm to Takeoff: Ground and Aerial Robots for Biological Systems Analysis
Abstract: Biological and agricultural environments are dynamic, unstructured, and uncertain, posing challenges for environmental data collection at the necessary spatial and temporal scales to enable meaningful systems analysis. Small unmanned systems, however, can overcome some of these challenges by enabling autonomous or human-assisted image-based and in situ environmental data collection. This talk will present a suite of [...]
AI in Space – From Earth Orbit to Mars and Beyond!
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence is playing an increasing role in our everyday lives and the business marketplace. This trend extends to the space sector, where AI has already shown considerable success and has the potential to revolutionize almost every aspect of space exploration. We first highlight a number of success stories of the tremendous impact of [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Self-Supervised Learning on Mobile Robots Using Acoustics, Vibration, and Visual Models to Build Rich Semantic Terrain Maps
Abstract: Humans and robots would benefit from having rich semantic maps of the terrain in which they operate. Mobile robots equipped with sensors and perception software could build such maps as they navigate through a new environment. This information could then be used by humans or robots for better localization and path planning, as well [...]
Multiple Drone Vision and Cinematography
Abstract: The aim of drone cinematography is to develop innovative intelligent single- and multiple-drone platforms for media production to cover outdoor events (e.g., sports) that are typically distributed over large expanses, ranging, for example, from a stadium to an entire city. The drone or drone team, to be managed by the production director and his/her [...]
Tartan AUV: A Dive into Carnegie Mellon’s RoboSub Team
Abstract: Founded last year, Tartan AUV is Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate underwater robotics team which competes annually in the RoboSub competition. RoboSub teams must design, build, and test autonomous underwater vehicles that compete each August to complete tasks related to underwater navigation, object detection and manipulation, and acoustic beacon localization. In this talk we will provide [...]
Beyond ROS: Using a Data Connectivity Framework to build and run Autonomous Systems
Virtual FRC Seminar: Seminar recording: https://cmu.zoom.us/rec/share/x84qF7_q8TlIcpHoyG_DRa58O6i8aaa8hCAW_fEPxEkBGjBVPyzW_lK0YW30RfJ3?startTime=1598551489000 Passcode: qu6)ePH9 Abstract: Next-generation robotics will need more than the current ROS code in order to comply with the interoperability, security and scalability requirements for commercial deployments. This session will provide a technical overview of ROS, ROS2 and the Data Distribution Service™ (DDS) protocol for data connectivity in safety-critical cyber-physical [...]
Towards more effective remote execution of exploration operations using multimodal interfaces
Abstract: Remote robots enable humans to explore and interact with environments while keeping them safe from existing harsh conditions (e.g., in search and rescue, deep sea or planetary exploration scenarios). However, the gap between the control station and the remote robot presents several challenges (e.g., situation awareness, cognitive load, perception, latency) for effective teleoperation. Multimodal [...]
Multi-Sensor Robot Navigation and Subterranean Exploration
Autonomous mobility in Mars exploration: recent achievements and future prospects
Abstract: This talk will summarize key recent advances in autonomous surface and aerial mobility for Mars exploration, then discuss potential future missions and technology needs for Mars and other planetary bodies. Among recent advances, the Perseverance rover that is now operating on Mars includes new autonomous navigation capability that dramatically increases its traverse speed over [...]
Robots Crossing Boundaries
Abstract: Over the last 50 years, autonomous robots have made the leap from being novel research contributions in university labs to becoming the fundamental technology upon which companies are built. While they traditionally have belonged to the engineering and computer science disciplines, robots have now crossed into other areas of study and research - making impacts in oceanography, geology, archaeology, biomechanics and biology. [...]