MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Benjamin Jensen

GHC 7101

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Swapnil Pande

NSH 3305

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Alvin Shek

NSH 4305

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Jiaqi Geng

NSH 4305

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. [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Jianchun Chen

NSH 4305

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 [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Thermal Management Considerations For Lunar Polar Micro-Rovers

GHC 9115

Meeting ID: 940 0396 4889 Passcode: 906118 Abstract:  This research addresses the significant and unprecedented challenge of thermal regulation for lunar polar micro-rovers.  These are distinct from priors by way of very small size, mass, and power, but particularly for the extremes of ambient environment in which they must operate. On the lunar poles, rovers experience temperatures [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Zhihao Zhang

NSH 4305

Title: Efficient Methods for Model Performance Inference Abstract: A key challenge in neural architecture search (NAS) is quickly inferring the predictive performance of a broad spectrum of neural networks to discover statistically accurate and computationally efficient ones. We refer to this task as model performance inference (MPI). The current practice for efficient MPI is gradient-based methods [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Chufan Gao

NSH A507

Title: Addressing Time-series Signal Quality in Healthcare Data Abstract: Healthcare data time-series signal quality assessment (SQA) plays a vital role in the accuracy and reliability of machine learning algorithms to analyze health metrics. However, these signals are often corrupted with different kinds of noises and artifacts, including Baseline Wander, Muscle Artifacts, Powerline Interference, and Equipment Failure. This [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Object Pose Estimation without Direct Supervision

NSH 4305

Abstract: Currently, robot manipulation is a special purpose tool, restricted to isolated environments with a fixed set of objects. In order to make robot manipulation more general, robots need to be able to perceive and interact with a large number of objects in cluttered scenes. Traditionally, object pose has been used as a representation to [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Improving Robotic Exploration with Self-Supervision and Diverse Data

NSH 3305

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for improving robotics, as it allows systems to move beyond passive learning and interact with the world while learning from these interactions. A key aspect of this interaction is exploration: which actions should an RL agent take to best learn about the world? Prior work on exploration is typically [...]