PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Image to LiDAR Map Registration using Late Feature Projection

Zoom Link Abstract: Accurate localization is essential for autonomous operation in many problem domains. This is most often performed by comparing LiDAR scans collected in real-time to a HD point cloud based map. While this enables centimeter-level accuracy, it depends on an expensive LiDAR sensor at run time. Recently, efforts have been underway to reduce [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Vision with Small Baselines

Zoom Link Abstract: 3D sensing with portable imaging systems is becoming more and more popular in computer vision applications such as autonomous driving, virtual reality, robotics manipulation and surveillance, due to the decreasing expense and size of RGB cameras. Despite the compactness and portability of the small baseline vision systems, it is well-known that the [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Provably Constant-time Motion Planning

Zoom Link Abstract: In manufacturing and warehouse scenarios, robots often perform recurring manipulation tasks in structured environments. Fast and reliable motion planning is one of the key elements that ensure efficient operations in such environments. A very common example scenario is of manipulators working at conveyor belts, where they have limited time to pick moving [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Humans In Their Natural Habitat: Training AI to Understand People

Zoom Link Abstract: Computer vision has a great potential to help our daily lives by searching for lost keys, watering flowers or reminding us to take a pill. To succeed with such tasks, computer vision methods need to be trained from real and diverse examples of our daily dynamic scenes. First, we need to give [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

A Theory of Fermat Paths for Non-line-of-sight Shape Reconstruction

Zoom Link Abstract: Traditionally, computer vision systems and algorithms, such as stereo vision, and shape from shading, have been developed to mimic human vision. As a consequence, a lot of these systems operate under constraints that we take for granted in human vision. An example of such a constraint is that the scene of interest [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Learning Contextual Actions for Heuristic Search-Based Motion Planning

Zoom Link Abstract: Heuristic search-based motion planning can be computationally costly in large state and action spaces. In this work we explore the use of generative models to learn contextual actions for successor generation in heuristic search. We focus on cases where the robot operates in similar environments, i.e. environments drawn from some underlying distribution. [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Safe and Resilient Multi-Robot Systems: Heterogeneity and Human Presence

Zoom Link Abstract: In the mission of a multi-robot team, the large number of robots behave like a system that relies on networking to enable smooth information propagation and inter-robot interaction as the mission evolves in a collective fashion. Key to the success of mission operation demands for safe and reliable robot interactions within the [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Michael Tatum – MSR Thesis Talk

Archived Zoom Video Password: 1u%i4YO%   Title: Communications Coverage in Unknown Underground Environments   Abstract:In field robotics, maintaining communications between the user at a stationary basestation and all deployed robots is essential.  This task's difficulty increases when the test environment is underground and the environment is unknown to the operator and robots.  A common approach [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Brendan Miller – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96617143856 Title: IBB-Net: Fast Iterative Bounding Box Regression for Point Clouds Abstract: Currently, most point cloud based detection pipelines are focused on producing high accuracy results while requiring significant computational resources and a high-end GPU. Our research explores how to reduce the computational overhead by improving a key element of detection: bounding box regression. We [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Interactive Weak Supervision – Learning Useful Heuristics for Data Labeling

Zoom Link Abstract: Obtaining large annotated datasets is critical for training successful machine learning models and it is frequently a bottleneck in practice. Weak supervision offers a promising alternative for producing labeled datasets without ground truth annotations by generating probabilistic labels using multiple noisy heuristics. This process can scale to large amounts of data and [...]