RI Seminar
Rendering Material Properties through Touch
Abstract: Humans haptically perceive the material properties of objects, such as roughness and compliance, through signals from sensory receptors in skin, muscles, tendons, and joints. Approaches to haptic rendering of material properties operate by stimulating, or attempting to stimulate, some or all of these receptor populations. My talk will describe research on haptic perception of [...]
From Automation to Autonomy and the Ubiquity of Moral Decision Making
Abstract: I argue that there is an important sense in which all decisions are moral decisions and I explore some implications of this insight (and its denial) for the design and human impacts of increasingly complex automated systems and emerging autonomous systems. This insight is obscured when we think about automated systems by the social [...]
Learning to Drive
Abstract: Why is our understanding of sensorimotor control behind our understanding of perception? I will talk about structural differences between perception and control, and how these differences can be mitigated to help advance sensorimotor control systems. Judicious use of simulation can play an important role and I will describe some simulation tools that we have [...]
Imaging the World One Photon at a Time
Abstract: The heart of a camera and one of the pillars for computer vision is the digital photodetector, a device that forms images by collecting billions of photons traveling through the physical world and into the lens of a camera. While the photodetectors used by cellphones or professional DSLR cameras are designed to aggregate as [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Lesson Learned from Two Decades of Robotics Development and Thoughts on Where We Go from Here
Abstract: In this talk, Herman Herman will offer various lessons learned from developing various robots for the last 2 decades at the National Robotics Engineering Center. He will also offer his perspective on the future of autonomous robots in various industries, including self-driving cars, material handling and consumer robotics. Bio: Dr. Herman Herman is the [...]
Factor Graphs for Robot Perception
Abstract: Factor graphs have become a popular tool for modeling robot perception problems. Not only can they model the bipartite relationship between sensor measurements and variables of interest for inference, but they have also been instrumental in devising novel inference algorithms that exploit the spatial and temporal structure inherent in these problems. I will overview [...]
Light-Sensitive Displays
Abstract: Nobel prize winner M. G. Lippmann described his dream of an ideal display as a “window into the world.” “While the current most perfect photographic print only shows one aspect of reality, reduced to a single image fixed in a plane, the direct view of reality offers, as we know, infinitely more variety.” Changing [...]
What People See in a Robot: A New Look at Human-Like Appearance
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 [...]
Safe Learning in Robotics
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 [...]
Bipolar Robotics – From the Arctic to the Antarctic with a stop for Fisheries in the middle latitudes.
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, [...]
Learning Robot Manipulation Skills through Experience and Generalization
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 [...]
Signal to Symbol (via Skills)
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 [...]
Multi-Modal Geometric Learning for Grasping
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 [...]
Building a Force-Controlled Actuator (Company)
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 [...]
Minimalist Visual Perception and Navigation for Consumer Drones
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 [...]
Social Perception for Machines
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 [...]