Student Talks
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Amrita Sawhney
Title: Learning to Perceive and Manipulate Diverse Food Materials Through Interaction Abstract: The home kitchen environment presents many challenges for an autonomous cooking robot, such as the deformability of food items, the wide range of material properties of food, and the complex interaction dynamics involved in food manipulation tasks. Material properties are important when interacting [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Haidar Jamal
Title: Localization for Lunar Micro-Rovers Abstract: This talk presents an avionics and localization system that enables a lunar micro-rover to navigate autonomously. This system is important for the latest class of small, low-powered, and fast robots going to the Moon in search of polar ice. The first component of the system is an Extended [...]
PoseIt: A Visual-Tactile Dataset of Holding Poses for Grasp Stability Analysis
Abstract: When humans grasp objects in the real world, we often move our arm to hold the object in a different pose where we can use it. In contrast, typical lab settings only study the stability of the grasp immediately after lifting, without any subsequent re-positioning of the arm. However, an object’s stability could vary [...]
Planning to Minimize Human and Robot Efforts Over Tasks
Abstract: It is not feasible to pre-program robots a priori for every possible task they may encounter in unstructured domains. Upon encountering a task that a robot can't solve, one common strategy is to teach it new skills via demonstrations. However, demonstrating a task can often be more cumbersome than performing the task directly. This [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Akash Sharma
Title: Incorporating Semantic Structure in SLAM Abstract: For robots to understand the environment they interact with, a combination of geometric information and semantic information is imperative. In this talk, I propose a fast and scalable Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that represents indoor scenes as a graph of semantic objects. Leveraging the observation that [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Yaadhav Raaj MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Exploiting Uncertainty in Triangulation Light Curtains for Object Tracking and Depth Estimation Abstract: Active sensing through the use of Adaptive Depth Sensors is a nascent field, with potential in areas such as Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). One such class of sensor is the Triangulation Light Curtain, which was developed in the Illumination and Imaging [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Active Vision: Autonomous Aerial Cinematography with Learned Artistic Decision-Making
Abstract: Aerial cinematography is revolutionizing industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints such as entertainment, sports, and security. Fundamentally, it is a tool with immense potential to improve human creativity, expressiveness, and sharing of experiences. However, safely piloting a drone while filming a moving target in the presence of obstacles is immensely taxing, often [...]
Fine-Tuning Offline Reinforcement Learning with Model-Based Policy Optimization
Abstract: In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we attempt to learn a control policy from a fixed dataset of environment interactions. This setting has the potential benefit of allowing us to learn effective policies without needing to collect additional interactive data, which can be expensive or dangerous in real-world systems. However, traditional off-policy RL methods tend [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Zhipeng Bao
Title: Introducing Generative Models to Facilitate Multi-Task Visual Learning Abstract: Motivated by multi-task learning of shared feature representations, this talk considers a novel problem of learning a shared generative model that can facilitate multi-task learning. We present two systems to utilize generative modeling for other visual tasks. The first system focuses on learning a generative [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Shanshan Jessy Xie
Title: GPU based perception via search for object pose estimation with RGB data Abstract: Known object pose estimation is essential for a robot to interact with the real world. It is the first and fundamental task if the robot wants to manipulate the object. This problem is particularly challenging when the environment is complicated [...]