Student Talks
Carnegie Mellon University
Robust Active SLAM for Real-time Large-scale Indoor Dense 3D Reconstruction
Abstract: Real-time dense 3D reconstruction of indoor environments has been a popular research field due to its wide application, such as inspection, virtual / augmented reality (VR/AR), and service robotics. While many state-of-the-art algorithms are capable of reconstructing accurate 3D dense models in general indoor scenes, robustness is still an unsolved problem for all of [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Direct Drive Hands: Force-Motion Transparency in Gripper Design
Abstract: The Direct Drive Hand (DDHand) project is exploring a new design philosophy for grippers. The conventional approach is to prioritize clamping force, leading to high gear ratios, slow motion, and poor transmission of force/motion signals. Instead, the DDHand prioritizes transparency: we view the gripper as a signal transmission channel, and seek high-bandwidth, high-fidelity transmission [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Terrain Relative Navigation for Lunar Polar Roving: Exploiting Geometry, Shadows, and Planning
Abstract: Water ice at the lunar poles could be the most valuable resource beyond planet Earth. However, that value is not foregone, and can only be determined by rovers that evaluate the distributions of abundance, concentration, and characteristics of this ice. The near-term explorations will be solar and unlikely to endure night, and hence are [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Learning to Align without Geometric Supervision
Abstract: Extracting geometric information from image data is a highly nonlinear problem that exhibits in a number of visual recognition tasks such as object localization, facial landmark tracking and human pose estimation. Successful alignment across image data often serves as a crucial component in making them possible. In this talk, I will present how one [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Hybrid Soft Sensing in Robotic Systems
Abstract: The increasing prevalence of wearable technology in our daily lives has created a demand for safe and robust sensing skins. Largely inspired by human skin, the ultimate goal of electronic skins is to measure diverse sensory information, conform to surfaces, and avoid interfering with the natural mechanics of the host or user. These demands [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Towards Safe and Robust Behavior Mixing for Multi-Robot Systems
Abstract: Multi-robot systems have been widely studied for extending its capability of accomplishing complex tasks through cooperative behaviors. In large-scale multi-robot behavior mixing, the heterogeneous robotic team executes simultaneously multiple behaviors or sequences of behaviors with various task-prescribed controllers in real time to increase efficiency in parallel tasks. Key to the success of behavior mixing [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Design and Evaluation of Robust Control Methods for Robotic Transfemoral Prostheses
Abstract: Amputees face a number of gait deficits due to a lack of control and power from their mechanically-passive prostheses. Of crucial importance among these deficits are those related to balance, as falls and a fear of falling can cause an avoidance of activity that leads to further debilitation. In this thesis, we investigate the [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Vigneshram Krishnamoorthy – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: A Computational Framework for Norm-Aware Reasoning in Autonomous Systems Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly deployed in complex social environments where they not only have to reason about their domain goals but also about norms that can impose constraints on task performance. Integrating task planning with norm aware reasoning is a challenging problem due to [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Deep Reinforcement Learning Representations for Robotics
Abstract: A long standing goal of robotics research is to create algorithms that can automatically learn complex control strategies from scratch. Part of the challenge of applying such algorithms to robots is the choice of representation. While RL algorithms have been successfully applied to many robotics tasks such as Ball-in-a-Cup and various RoboCup soccer domains, [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Speeding Up Search-based Motion Planning Via Conservative Heuristics
Abstract: Weighted A* search (wA*) is a popular tool for robot motion-planning. Its efficiency however depends on the quality of heuristic function used. In fact, it has been shown that the correlation between the heuristic function and the true cost-to-goal significantly affects the efficiency of the search, when used with a large weight on the [...]