MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Evan Harber

Title: Stiffness Mapping of Deformable Objects Through Supervised Embedding and Gaussian Process Regression   Abstract: The stiffness map of a deformable object stores information about that object's surface compliance. Thus, through a stiffness map, we gain insight into the physical properties of that object. Depending on the object, an understanding of stiffness has applications ranging [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Gaurav Parmar

NSH 1109

Title: Spatially-Adaptive Multilayer GAN Inversion   Abstract: Existing GAN inversion and editing methods are well suited for only a target images that contain aligned objects with a clean background, such as portraits and animal faces, but often struggle for more difficult categories with complex scene layouts and object occlusions, such as cars, animals, and outdoor images. [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Manash Pratim Das

TBA

Title: Model-Accuracy Aware Anytime Planning with Simulation Verification for Navigating Complex Terrains Abstract: Off-road and unstructured environments often contain complex patches of various types of terrain, rough elevation changes, deformable objects, etc. An autonomous ground vehicle traversing such environments experiences physical interactions that are extremely hard to model at scale and thus very hard to [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Akshay Dharamavaram

NSH 4305

Title: Stabilizing the Training Dynamics of Generative Models using Self-Supervision   Abstract: Generative Models have been shown to be adept in mimicking the behavior of an unknown distribution solely from bootstrapped data. However, deep learning models have been shown to overfit in either the minimization or maximization stage of the two player min-max game, resulting [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Vivek Roy

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Title: Smartphone localization for Indoor Pedestrian Navigation Abstract: Global positioning system (GPS) interfacing with applications such as Google Maps has proven very useful for navigation in outdoor open settings. However in crowded metropolitan environments with high rise buildings or in indoor settings, GPS quickly becomes unreliable. Using sensors found on commodity smartphones to perform accurate [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Zhe Huang

NSH 4305

Title: Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving Abstract: Due to the complex and safety-critical nature of autonomous driving, recent works typically test their ideas on simulators designed for the very purpose of advancing self-driving research. Despite the convenience of modeling autonomous driving as a trajectory optimization problem, few of these methods resort to online reinforcement [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk- Xinjie Yao

NSH 4305

Title: Ride Comfort-Aware Visual Navigation via Self-Supervised Learning Abstract: Under shared autonomy, wheelchair users expect vehicles to provide safe and comfortable rides while following users’ high-level navigation plans. To find such a path, vehicles negotiate with different terrains and assess their traversal difficulty. Most prior works model surroundings either through geometric representations or semantic classifications, [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MS Thesis Talk – Shun Iwase

GHC 6501

Title: Fast 6D Object Pose Refinement via Deep Texture Rendering   Abstract: We present RePOSE, a fast iterative refinement method for 6D object pose estimation. Prior methods perform refinement by feeding zoomed-in input and rendered RGB images into a CNN and directly regressing an update of a refined pose. Their runtime is slow due to the [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Vision-based Aircraft Detection and Tracking for Detect-and-Avoid

NSH 4305

Abstract: Detect-and-Avoid (DAA) capabilities are critical for autonomous operations of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). Traditionally DAA systems for large aircraft have been ground and radar-based. Due to the size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints of sUAS, current DAA systems rely mainly on vision-based sensors and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) transponders. However, not all flying [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Yash Oza

NSH 3305

Title: Preprocessing-based Methods for Robotic Manipulation Abstract: Robotic manipulation is a key problem for several applications such as welding, pick-and-place, and automated assembly. However, motion planning for manipulation can be computationally expensive as it requires planning in the high-dimensional configuration space of the manipulator. Additionally, task-specific constraints such as strict time limits or constraints on end-effector [...]