RI Seminar
Bertram F. Malle
Professor
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences and Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative , Brown University

What People See in a Robot: A New Look at Human-Like Appearance

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: A long-standing question in HRI is what effects a robot’s human-like appearance has on various psychological responses.  A substantial literature has demonstrated such effects on liking, trust, ascribed intelligence, and so on.  Much of this work has relied on a construct of uni-dimensional low to high human-likeness. I introduce evidence for an alternative view according to which [...]

RI Seminar
Claire J. Tomlin
Professor
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley

Safe Learning in Robotics

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: A great deal of research in recent years has focused on robot learning.  In many applications, guarantees that specifications are satisfied throughout the learning process are paramount. For the safety specification, we present a controller synthesis technique based on the computation of reachable sets, using optimal control and game theory.  In the first part [...]

RI Seminar
Hanumant Singh
Professor
Mechanical & industrial Engineering, Northeastern University

Bipolar Robotics – From the Arctic to the Antarctic with a stop for Fisheries in the middle latitudes.

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: The Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland remain some of the least explored parts of the planet. This talk looks at efforts over the last decade to explore areas under-ice which have traditionally been difficult to access. The focus of the talk will be on the robots, the role of communications over low bandwidth acoustic links, [...]

VASC Seminar
Philipp Krähenbühl
Professor
Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Austin

Video Compression for Recognition & Video Recognition for Compression

GHC 6501

Abstract: Training robust deep video representations has proven to be much more challenging than learning deep image representations. One reason is: videos are huge and highly redundant. The 'true' and interesting signal often drowns in too much irrelevant data. In the first part of the talk, I will show how to train a deep network [...]

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 [...]