MSR Speaking Qualifier
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Bassam Bikdash
Title: Boundary-Aware Demons Algorithm with Applications in Electronic Waste Recycling Abstract Electronic waste (e-waste) refers to electronic devices that are nearing the end of their useful life, and are discarded, donated, or given away. Valuable metallic and plastic components in e-waste (gold, silver, platinum) is estimated to value upwards of $60 billion and although e-waste represents [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Mary Hatfalvi
Title: Introspective Perception through Identifying Blur, Light Direction, and Angle-of-View Abstract Robotic perception tasks have achieved great performance, especially in autonomous vehicles and robot assistance. However, we still often do not understand how and when perception tasks fail. Researchers have achieved some success in creating introspective perception systems that detect when perception tasks will fail, [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Bowei Chen
Title: Image Synthesis with Appearance Decomposition Abstract: Our visual world is compositional and its appearance can be decomposed into various components. Leveraging these components can be beneficial for challenging image synthesis tasks. To this end, this thesis focuses on studying how appearance decomposition can improve image synthesis methods using two examples. (1) Structural decomposition: we introduce [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Ivan Cisneros
Title: A VPR-Based Technique for UAV Localization In Unseen Environments Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) primarily rely on GPS-assisted localization and navigation due to the accessibility and ubiquity of such systems. However, this presents a potentially catastrophic single point of failure that may prevent autonomous UAVs from becoming truly reliable, as GPS is prone to dropout, [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Yehonathan Litman
Title: GPS-Denied Global Visual-Inertial Ground Vehicle State Estimation via Image Registration Abstract: Robotic systems such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) often depend on GPS for navigation in outdoor environments. In GPS-denied environments, one approach to maintain a global state estimate is localizing based on preexisting georeferenced aerial or satellite imagery. However, this is inherently challenged [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – George Cazenavette
Title: Learning to Distill Datasets by Matching Expert Training Trajectories Project Page: https://georgecazenavette.github.io/mtt-distillation/ Abstract: Dataset distillation is the task of synthesizing a small dataset such that a model trained on the synthetic set will match the test accuracy of the model trained on the full dataset. In this talk, we review 3 several of our recent [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Zongyue Zhao
Title: Coordinating Heterogeneous Teams for Urban Search and Rescue Abstract: The mission of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) has drawn significant interest in robotics. Autonomous entities must be able to share knowledge efficiently to address visibility and collaboration challenges in a complex environment shortly after structural collapse catastrophes. In this thesis, we present methods to coordinate [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Jeff Hu
Title: Composition Learning in “Modular” Robot Systems Abstract: Modular robot and multi-robot systems share a concept in common: composition, i.e. the study of how parts can be combined so they can be used to achieve certain objectives. Our vision is to enable robotic systems to configure and reconfigure themselves during field deployment, either autonomously or [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Tom Bu
Title: Towards HD Map Updates With Crosswalk Change Detection From Vehicle-mounted Cameras Zoom: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/4452379705 Abstract: Many autonomous vehicles rely on high-definition maps that contain road layout and road semantics as priors for perception, planning and prediction. However, these maps can become stale over time as the road environment changes. This thesis develops a road monitoring framework [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Zilin Si
Title: Taxim: An Example-based Simulation Model for GelSight Tactile Sensors and its Sim-to-Real Applications Location: NSH 4305 or Zoom https://cmu.zoom.us/j/91769761787?pwd=cGZ2RElKMVJaQ1NVNG5BdFQ0Ny9uQT09 Abstract: Simulation is widely used in robotics for system verification and large-scale data collection. However, simulating a robot system efficiently and with high fidelity, from sensing, perception to manipulation, has been a long-standing challenge. Tactile sensing, as [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Benjamin Jensen
Title: A Low-Cost Attitude Determination and Control System and Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed for CubeSats Zoom: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/92654622790?pwd=d0pYcTJ4K0xzdmYvUHFYWC9lMDBhQT09 Abstract: Since their initial development in the late 1990s, CubeSats have quickly grown popular due to their relatively low cost and short development period. However, CubeSat launches are prone to failure, with less than half of CubeSats completely fulfilling their [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Swapnil Pande
Title: Driving by Dreaming: Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles Abstract: While there has been significant progress in deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) in urban driving settings, there remains a long-tail of challenging motion planning scenarios that must be addressed before truly driverless operation is possible. The current paradigm for motion planner [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Alvin Shek
Title: Learning from Physical Human Feedback: An Object-Centric One-Shot Adaptation Method Abstract: For robots to be effectively deployed in novel environments and tasks, they must be able to understand the feedback expressed by humans during intervention. This can either correct undesirable behavior or indicate additional preferences. Existing methods either require repeated episodes of interactions or [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Jiaqi Geng
Title: Dense Human Pose Estimation From WiFi Abstract: Advances in computer vision and machine learning techniques have led to significant development in 2D and 3D human pose estimation from RGB cameras, LiDAR, and radars. However, human pose estimation from images is adversely affected by occlusion and lighting, which are common in many scenarios of interest. [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Jianchun Chen
Title: An efficient approach for sequential shape human performance capture from monocular video Abstract: Human performance capture from RGB videos in unconstrained environments has become very popular for applications to generate virtual avatars or digital actors. Modern approaches rely on neural network algorithms to estimate geometry directly from images, resulting in a coarse representation of [...]