MSR Speaking Qualifier
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Harjatin Baweja
Title: Leveraging Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning for contact and non-contact based plant phenotyping. Abstract: Effective plant breeding requires scientists to find correspondences between genetic markers and desirable physical traits (phenotypes) of the genotype. Robotics can aid the acceleration of breeding pipeline by facilitating high throughput plant phenotyping. In this thesis we propose [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Suhit Kodgule
Title: Active Sampling for Planetary Rover Exploration Abstract: Planetary Robotics research has expanded beyond simply developing robust navigation strategies for rovers to providing them with the capability of performing intelligent actions so as to develop a better interpretation and understanding of the environment. This will become essential in the future, when rovers explore regions far [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Matthew Collins – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Efficient Planning for High-Speed MAV Flight in Unknown Environments Using Sparse Topological Graphs Abstract: Safe high-speed autonomous navigation for MAVs in unknown environments requires fast planning to enable the robot to adapt and react quickly to incoming information about obstacles within the world. Furthermore, when operating in environments not known a priori, the robot [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk – Siva Chaitanya Mynepalli
Title: Recognizing Tiny Faces Abstract: Objects are naturally captured over a continuous range of distances, causing dramatic changes in appearance, especially at low resolutions. Recognizing such small objects at range is an open challenge in object recognition. In this paper, we explore solutions to this problem by tackling the fine-grained task of face recognition. State-of-the-art embeddings [...]
MSR Thesis Talk – Matt Martone
Title: Design and Control of a Large Modular Hexapod Abstract: Legged robotic systems have made great strides in recent years, but unlike wheeled robots, limbed locomotion does not scale well. Long legs demand huge torques, driving up actuator size and onboard battery mass. This relationship results in massive structures that lack the safety, portability, [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Jenny Nan
Title: Combining Deep Learning and Verification for Precise Object Instance Detection Abstract: Deep learning based object detectors often return false positives with very high confidence. Although they optimize generic detection performance, such as mean average precision (mAP), they are not designed for reliability. For a reliable detection system, if a high confidence detection is [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis talk – Vasu Agrawal
Title: Ground Up Design of a Multi-modal Object Localization System Abstract: Rapid situational awareness is the key to enabling a successful response from first responders during an emergency, where time is of the essence. Emergency personnel are often sent into incident scenes to gather information, but this is often a dangerous and slow process. Subterranean environments [...]
MSR Thesis Talk – Swaminathan Gurumurthy
Title: Improving generalization in data-driven models with task-specific knowledge Abstract: With the rise of the over-parameterized deep learning models and massive datasets, many have started advocating towards minimizing the amount of prior knowledge added to a learning model. Ironically, the traditional machine learning community advocated for exactly the opposite. Whereas the latter assumes knowledge of [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Aditya Dhawale – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Hierarchical Gaussian Distributions for Real-Time SLAM ZOOM Link: (Virtual Presentation) https://cmu.zoom.us/j/7210519673 Abstract: We present Gaussian distributions as structure primitives in a hierarchical multi-fidelity framework to enable accurate real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) using uncertain depth data. Real-time mapping and localization capabilities on a mobile robot can enable deployment of robots in real-world scenarios. An autonomous system must [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Qian Long – MSR Thesis Talk
ZOOM Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/7263914910 Title: Evolutionary Population Curriculum for Scaling Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Abstract: In multi-agent games, the complexity of the environment can grow exponentially as the number of agents increases, so it is particularly challenging to learn good policies when the agent population is large. We introduce Evolutionary Population Curriculum (EPC), a curriculum learning [...]