RI Seminar
Associate Professor
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Learning Robot Manipulation Skills through Experience and Generalization

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: In the future, robots could be used to take care of the elderly, perform household chores, and assist in hazardous situations. However, such applications require robots to manipulate objects in unstructured and everyday environments. Hence, in order to perform a wide range of tasks, robots will need to learn manipulation skills that generalize between [...]

RI Seminar
George Konidaris
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, Brown University

Signal to Symbol (via Skills)

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: While recent years have seen dramatic progress in the development of affordable, general-purpose robot hardware, the capabilities of that hardware far exceed our ability to write software to adequately control. The key challenge here is one of abstraction: generally capable behavior requires high-level reasoning and planning, but perception and actuation must ultimately be performed [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Autonomous drone cinematographer: Using artistic principles to create smooth, safe, occlusion-free trajectories for aerial filming

Gates Hillman Center 4405

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 [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar

Visual SLAM with Semantic Scene understanding

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Peter K. Allen
Professor of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University

Multi-Modal Geometric Learning for Grasping

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract:  In this talk, we will describe methods to enable robots to grasp novel objects using multi-modal data and machine.  The starting point is an architecture to enable robotic grasp planning via shape completion using a single occluded depth view of objects.  Shape completion is accomplished through the use of a 3D CNN. The network [...]

RI Seminar
Dave Rollinson
Co-Founder
HEBI Robotics

Building a Force-Controlled Actuator (Company)

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: In 2014, I was lucky enough to be one of 5 people to start HEBI Robotics, with the dream of eventually making the task of building custom robots as easy as building with Lego.  A few years later we are now 10 people, and our first product, a series of modular force-controlled actuators, is [...]

RI Seminar
Shaojie Shen
Assistant Professor
Director, HKUST-DJI Joint Innovation Lab, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Minimalist Visual Perception and Navigation for Consumer Drones

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Consumer drone developers often face the challenge of achieving safe autonomous navigation under very tight size, weight, power, and cost constraints. In this talk, I will present our recent results towards a minimalist, but complete perception and navigation solution utilizing only a low-cost monocular visual-inertial sensor suite. I will start with an introduction of [...]

RI Seminar
Consulting Professor
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Social Perception for Machines

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Despite decades of progress, machines remain intelligent tools rather than collaborative partners in individual human enterprise. A key reason is that machine perception of inter-personal communication is largely unsolved and a computationally accessible representation of such behavior remains elusive. In this talk, I will describe our research arc over the past decade at CMU [...]