Seminar
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 [...]
Interactive Scene Understanding
Abstract Despite recent progress, AI is still far from understanding the physics of the world, and there is a large gap between the abilities of humans and the state-of-the-art AI methods. In this talk, I will focus on physics-based scene understanding and interactive visual reasoning, which are crucial next steps in computer vision and AI. [...]
Robotic Manipulation under clutter and uncertainty with and around people
Abstract Robots manipulate with super-human speed and dexterity on factory floors. But yet they fail even under moderate amounts of clutter or uncertainty. However, human teleoperators perform remarkable acts of manipulation with the same hardware. My research goal is to bridge the gap between what robotic manipulators can do now and what they are capable [...]
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. [...]