MSR Thesis Defense
Carnegie Mellon University
Wire Detection, Reconstruction, and Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Abstract Thin objects, such as wires and power lines are one of the most challenging obstacles to detect and avoid for UAVs, and are a cause of numerous accidents each year. This thesis makes contributions in three areas of this domain: wire segmentation, reconstruction, and avoidance. Pixelwise wire detection can be framed as a binary [...]
The Art of Robotics: Toward a Holistic Approach
I arrived at the Robotics Institute two years ago looking for a good project, something tangible and preferably related to legged locomotion. Instead, I met Matt Mason and started to think about the big picture, ask the big questions. What is manipulation? What is robotics? What makes robotics particularly hard? To answer these questions, I [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Mapping gamma sources and their flux fields using non-directional flux measurements
There is a compelling need to determine the location and activity of radiation sources from the flux that they generate. There is also a need to create dense flux maps from sparse measurements. This research solves these dual problems. An example of a situation where these capabilities would be vital is at the location of [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Automated Design of Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulators
Grasp planning and motion synthesis for dexterous manipulation tasks are traditionally done given a pre-existing kinematic model for the robotic hand. In this thesis, we introduce a framework for automatically designing hand topologies best suited for manipulation tasks given high level objectives as input. Our goal is to ultimately design a program that is able [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Toward Invariant Visual Inertial State Estimation using Information Sparsification
Abstract In this work, we address two current challenges in real-time visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems - efficiency and accuracy. To this end, we present a novel approach to tightly couple visual and inertial measurements in a fixed-lag VIO framework using information sparsification. To bound computational complexity, fixed-lag smoothers perform marginalization of variables but consequently deteriorate accuracy and [...]
Generative Point Cloud Modeling with Gaussian Mixture Models for Multi-Robot Exploration
Autonomous exploration in rich 3D environments requires the construction and maintenance of a representation derived from accumulated 3D observations. Volumetric models, which are commonly employed to enable joint reasoning about occupied and free space, scale poorly with the size of the environment. Techniques employed to mitigate this scaling include hierarchical discretization, learning local data summarizations [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Integrating Model-based Planning with Skill learning for Mobile Manipulation
With an ever-growing demand to automate different day-to-day activities, the task of autonomous manipulation using articulated robots has gained serious traction lately. In this regard, motion planning for manipulation is one of the highly researched topics. The Motion planning for manipulation is often cast as either a model-based planning problem or a machine learning problem. However, both of these [...]
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 [...]