MSR Thesis Defense
Carnegie Mellon University
In-Field Robotic Leaf Grasping and Automated Crop Spectroscopy
Agricultural robotics is a growing field of intelligent automation that is proving to drastically increase the speed and reliability of in-field tasks such as precision seed planting, harvesting, field mapping, and crop monitoring. More specifically, plant breeders are beginning to use robotic systems to record the physical traits of crops throughout the growing season at [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Soft-matter Artificial Muscle by Electrochemical Surface Oxidation of Liquid Metal
Natural muscles, a result of more than 500 millions years of evolution, are elegant machines that generate force and motion electrochemically. The brief history of robotics does not have the luxury of millions of years to reverse-engineer many aspects of life. The development of artificial muscles therefore seeks to build more muscle-like actuators for robots. [...]
Radiation Source Localization using a Gamma-ray Camera
Radiation source localization is a common and critical task across applications such as nuclear facility decommissioning, radioactive disaster response, and security. Traditional count-based sensors (e.g. Geiger counters) infer range to the source based on the observed number of gamma photons, expected source strength, and assumed intermediate attenuation from the environment. In cluttered 3D settings, such [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Improving Imitation Learning through Efficient Expert Querying
Learning from demonstration is an intuitive approach to encoding complex behaviors in autonomous agents. Learners have shown success in challenging tasks like autonomous driving, aerial obstacle avoidance, and information gathering, through observation and mimicry alone. State of the art algorithms like Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) have made significant advances over traditional behavior cloning, demonstrating strong theoretical [...]
Failure Is an Option: How the Severity of Robot Errors Affects Human-Robot Interactions
Abstract: Just as humans are imperfect, even the best of robots will eventually fail at performing a task. The likelihood of failure increases as robots expand their roles in our lives. Although task failure is a common problem in robotics and human-robot interaction (HRI), there has been little research investigating human tolerance to said failures, [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Avi Rudich
Title: Kinematic Analysis of 3D Printed Flexible Delta Robots Abstract: Flexible Delta robots show significant promise for use in a wide array of manipulation tasks. They are simple to design and manufacture, and they maintain a high level of repeatability and precision in open loop control. This thesis analyzes the kinematic properties of flexible [...]
Learning Parameter-Efficient Quadrotor Dynamics Models
Abstract: Operation of quadrotors through high-speed, high-acceleration maneuvers remains a challenging problem due to the complex aerodynamics in this regime. While standard physical models suffice for control in near-hover conditions, the primary challenge in executing aggressive trajectories is obtaining a model for the quadrotor dynamics that adequately models the aerodynamic effects present, including lift, drag, [...]
Human-in-the-loop Model Creation
Abstract: Deep generative models make visual content creation more accessible to novice users by automating the synthesis of diverse, realistic content based on a collected dataset. However, the current machine learning approaches miss several elements of the creative process -- the ability to synthesize things that go far beyond the data distribution and everyday experience, [...]
Learning Models and Cost Functions from Unlabeled Data for Off-Road Driving
Abstract: Off-road driving is an important instance of navigation in unstructured environments, which is a key robotics problem with many applications, such as exploration, agriculture, disaster response and defense. The key challenge in off-road driving is to be able to take in high dimensional, multi-modal sensing data and use it to make intelligent decisions on [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Chonghyuk Song
Title: Total-Recon: Deformable Scene Reconstruction for Embodied View Synthesis Abstract: We explore the task of embodied view synthesis from monocular videos of deformable scenes. Given a minute-long RGBD video of people interacting with their pets, we render the scene from novel camera trajectories derived from in-scene motion of actors: (1) egocentric cameras that simulate the point [...]