Field Robotics Center Seminar

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]